26 Facts About Thomas Willis

Thomas Willis FRS was an English physician who played an important part in the history of anatomy, neurology, and psychiatry, and was a founding member of the Royal Society.

Thomas Willis was a kinsman of the Willys baronets of Fen Ditton, Cambridgeshire.

Thomas Willis maintained an Anglican position; an Anglican congregation met at his lodgings in the 1650s, including John Fell, John Dolben, and Richard Allestree.

Fell's father Samuel Fell had been expelled as Dean of Christ Church in 1647; Thomas Willis married Samuel Fell's daughter Mary, and his brother-in-law John Fell would later be his biographer.

Thomas Willis was on close terms with Wren's sister Susan Holder, skilled in the healing of wounds.

Thomas Willis lived on Merton Street, Oxford, from 1657 to 1667.

Thomas Willis later worked as a physician in Westminster, London, this coming about after he treated Gilbert Sheldon in 1666.

Thomas Willis had a successful medical practice, in which he applied both his understanding of anatomy and known remedies, attempting to integrate the two; he mixed both iatrochemical and mechanical views.

Thomas Willis combined the physician's expert anatomical sophistication with the fluent use of an interpretive apparatus that see-sawed between novelty and tradition, Galenism and Gassendist atomism, iatrochemistry and mechanism.

Thomas Willis is mentioned in John Aubrey's Brief Lives; their families became linked generations later through the marriage of Aubrey's distant cousin Sir John Aubrey, 6th Baronet of Llantrithyd to Martha Catherine Carter, the grand-niece of Sir William Willys, 6th Baronet of Fen Ditton.

Thomas Willis was a pioneer in research into the anatomy of the brain, nervous system and muscles.

Thomas Willis's most notable discovery was the "Circle of Willis", a circle of arteries on the base of the brain.

In 1667 Thomas Willis published Pathologicae cerebri, et nervosi generis specimen, an important work on the pathology and neurophysiology of the brain.

Thomas Willis could be seen as an early pioneer of the mind-brain supervenience claim prominent in present-day neuropsychiatry and philosophy of mind.

Thomas Willis was the first to number the cranial nerves in the order in which they are now usually enumerated by anatomists.

Thomas Willis noted the parallel lines of the mesolobe, afterwards minutely described by Felix Vicq-d'Azyr.

Thomas Willis seems to have recognised the communication of the convoluted surface of the brain and that between the lateral cavities beneath the fornix.

Thomas Willis described the corpora striata and optic thalami; the four orbicular eminences, with the bridge, which he first named annular protuberance; and the white mammillary eminences, behind the infundibulum.

Thomas Willis replaced Nemesius's doctrine, which had identified the ventricles of the brain as the location of cognition.

Thomas Willis deduced that the ventricles contained cerebrospinal fluid which collected waste products from effluents.

Thomas Willis recognized the cortex as the substrate of cognition and claimed that the gyrencephalia was related to a progressive increase in the complexity of cognition.

Thomas Willis was one of the pioneers in the diabetes research.

Thomas Willis observed what had been known for many centuries in India, China and the Arab world, that the urine is sweet in patients, however he hadn't coined the term mellitus as it is commonly claimed.

Thomas Willis was the first to identify achalasia cardia in 1672.

Thomas Willis's work gained currency in France through the writings of Daniel Duncan.

Between 1724 and 1730, Browne Thomas Willis rebuilt St Martin's Church on the site of the old Chantry Chapel of St Margaret and St Catherine at Fenny Stratford.