From Dalrymple’s weekly BMJ column on medicine and literature:

The ambition to understand the workings of the brain, the better to control thoughts and emotions, is an old one—as is the claim that such understanding is just around the corner. In 1880 the American socialist Edward Bellamy (1850-98), best known for his utopian novel Looking Backward, implied this claim in his novel Dr Heidenhoff’s Process…

Read the essay (purchase required)