39. William James's class notes on lectures at Harvard Medical School

Although he never practiced as a physician, William James—philosopher and psychologist best known for The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)—received a degree from Harvard Medical School in 1869 and taught physiology during the 1870s. This notebook was used by James as a Harvard student just after the Civil War, as he attended the lectures of Henry J. Bigelow, Henry I. Bowditch, and other members of the medical faculty.

In a letter to his sister, Alice, from this period, James claimed he had just attended a lecture “which I could not understand a word of, but rather enjoyed the sensation of listening to for an hour.” Here William James—despite his wandering attention—has taken notes on the lectures of Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard on writer’s palsy, reflex paraplegia, and other diseases of the nervous system