Love isn’t just fodder for poets. For as long as people have been falling for each other, scientists have worked hard to locate the roots of love somewhere in the body. The ancient Greeks and medieval men of medicine believed that imbalances in bodily fluids like phlegm and blood were responsible for that weak-kneed, goofy-smiled condition of longing, but as early as the 1660s researchers had begun to grasp at the brain’s role in romantic love. Modern-day scientists know a lot more about how the emotion works — it involves the brain’s reward centers and pleasure chemicals like dopamine — but it’s still up for debate whether science or poetry describes it better.
What Is Love? A Brief History of its Many Medical Meanings
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Thomas Willis, the father of modern neurology and the leader of a group of doctors, chemists and philosophers known as the Oxford Circle, was the first to suggest that the brain was responsible for many of the emotional and reactive human behaviors. His 1667 encyclopedia of diseases of the brain included "love sickness" as a neurological reaction to falling in love. Love, he believed, was the result of certain chemicals "dancing" along the nerves. In this way, he introduced the idea that emotional and mental phenomena could be the result of physiological occurrences. Subscribers of Willis' theory believed that people who were physically sensitive or had "too much sensibility" — for example, those who had an outsized reaction to being pricked with a pin — were more susceptible to neurological responses to love. So the idea was that some people were innately predisposed to certain problems like paleness, sleeplessness, loss of appetite and blushing under the external influence of love.
