Before the era of modern psychology, a heterogeneous group of alienists, self-help gurus, and anatomists proposed that the structure of the brain could be used to explain how the mind worked. Suddenly, nineteenth-century readers and writers had to contend with the idea that qualities once ascribed to disembodied souls may arise from a mere lump of cranial matter. In a period when scientists and literary writers frequently published in the same periodicals, the ensuing debate over the material mind was a public one. Writing the Brain demonstrates, by examining several canonical works and textual rediscoveries, that these exchanges not only influenced how poets and novelists fictionalized the mind but also how scientists thought and talked about their discoveries. From George Combe to Charles Dickens, from Emily Dickinson to Pliny Earle, from Benjamin Rush to Alfred Tennyson, 1800s debated what it means to have or, rather, be a brain.