The Bactra Review   The First Moderns
Here is a representative nit: on p. 115, we read that ``It was in the year 1906 that Cajal's disciple Sherrington coined the word `synapse' to describe the junction between one nerve cell and another.'' Sherrington was a ``disciple'' of Cajal's only in the sense of being an admirer of the latter's work, and while he did coin the word ``synapse,'' it was in an 1897 physiology textbook, not his 1906 classic on The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. (Is the idea of the nervous system being an organ of integration a typically 19th century notion about wholeness, or a typically Modernist idea in recognizing that even organic unity has to be worked for?)