This presentation tries to explain how 20th-century medicine became disentangled from mind-body philosophies, highlighting the role of neurosurgical therapy in the post-war era. Around 1950, the few neurosurgeon specialists available dealt with the fallout of increasing traffic: a rising number of patients, especially motorcyclists, with traumatic brain injuries, often suffering from loss of consciousness. Contrary to earlier beliefs, therapy of subconscious patients clarified that consciousness was associated with the subcortical (rather than the cortical) structures of the brain, and hence many surgeons became obsessed with re-mapping consciousness below the cortex as a precondition to rational thinking. At the same time, neurosurgeons developed new methods to assess their patients’ consciousness, eventually leading to the standardized scaling of levels of consciousness in medicine, later exemplified by the Glasgow Coma Scale. Subsequently, in the medical context, consciousness became a matter of patient assessment rather than epistemology. This new biological approach to consciousness was underpinned by a new image of the brain, as neurosurgeons increasingly relied on electroencephalography, which displayed a ‘floaty’ and multipolar nature of human brain activity.
In contrast to psychiatrists or lobotomists, neurosurgeons could hardly relate their clinical experience with consciousness to concurrent philosophical and psychological traditions, such as Neo-Freudian concepts of consciousness and unconsciousness. This marked the beginning of a long-term divide between biologically oriented medicine and mind-body philosophies in the post-war era.