On July 12, 1821, Charles Bell read the first of a brilliant series of lectures, “On the Nerves,” to the Royal Society, with Humphry Davy (now a respectable baronet) in the President's chair. The lectures, published soon after in the Philosophical Transactions, summed up Bell's work to date, with special attention to the facial nerves and their network of connections, via the brain and spinal cord, to the respiratory and circulatory systems – the cornerstone of his thinking on how facial expression, speech, breathing, the heart, and the “emotions and passions of the mind” all functioned holistically through the medium of the brain and nerves (112: 285–6). They also bore witness, Bell announced, to the “new character” that the nervous system had assumed through the “gradually accumulating” discoveries of the metropolitan “schools,” thanks to which its “intricacies” had been “unravelled, and the peculiar structure and function of the individual nerves ascertained,” replacing the “absolute confusion” of the past with the revelation of its “natural and simple order” (111: 398). Now “even the youngest students” of the London medical schools learn enough about the newly revealed nervous system to understand its basic workings and to “decypher and to read” its hermetic “language” (111: 400).