The English physician Thomas Willis (1621-75) occupies a curious place in histories of seventeenth-century English science and medicine. As the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy and the pre-eminent physician of the Restoration period, he was a prominent figure of the intellectual and social landscape. He wrote more than a dozen medical works and his patients included the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of York's family, and Lady Anne Conway. He associated with such renowned philosophers as