Charles Bell

Mm-hmm.

So there's Charles Bell- Okay ... who's considered the father of modern neurology and the namesake for Bell's palsy.

Bell's palsy.

He's often credited with describing what is thought to be the first case of ALS or, yeah, it, it, it's kind of hard to do retrospective diagnosis, but- Right ... he's credited with, you know, describing the first case of ALS in 1824.

I had intended adding to the present volumes an essay on the expression of the various emotions by man and the lower animals.

My attention was called to the subject many years ago by Sir Charles Bell's admirable This illustrious anatomist maintains that man is endowed with certain muscles solely for the sake of expressing his emotions.

As this view is obviously opposed to the belief that man is descended from some other and lower form, it was necessary for me to consider it.

I likewise wish to ascertain how far the emotions are expressed in the same manner.

So we're really getting a very strong Scottish influence in this school down in London.

And then this is the point when a man called Charles Bell enters our story.

And Charles Bell, I'm sure you know, Shantae, is very well known in this museum.

One of our most famous things is one of his paintings, the Apostotinus painting.

It's the

And Charles realizes that this means that he is not going to have too many good job opportunities up here in Edinburgh.

So in 1804, he goes down to London.

And one of the most amazing things about Charles Bell is that he writes a lot of letters to another brother, his brother George.

Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3.

Sir Charles Bell has given a lifelike figure of a man who is shrinking back from some terrible danger and is on the point of screaming out in abject terror.

He is represented with his shoulders lifted up almost to his ears, and this at once declares that there is no thought of resistance.

A shrugging the shoulders generally implies, I cannot do this or that.

Yet that tradition is enchanted in its own way.

One of the nineteenth century's most eminent anatomists, Charles Bell, wrote The Hand , a medical text on God's design.

And not long after, humanity's deep past was being retold through the human hand.

In The Descent of Man , Charles Darwin recounted that one day, standing upright, the hand of the primate called Homo sapiens was free to grasp, and so to evolve differently, uniquely.