The efforts of this group of scientists, working independently of each other throughout the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, laid the ground for the modern fascination with what Michael Gershon has described as the ‘second brain’.28 Gershon made a claim for the existence of this so-called second brain based on the self-governance of the gut, and the fact that it is a ‘site of neural integration and processing’ that ‘can elect not to do the bidding of the brain or spinal cord’.
