Anyone who didn't spend this spring in a severely media-deprived
　　　　  locale--an Antarctic substation, say, or the lazily pinwheeling
　　　　  Russian spacelab--has probably heard the news: Rene Descartes, the
　　　　  17th-century mathematician who shaped the world as we know it, has
　　　　  been officially pronounced dead.
　　　　  The eulogy was delivered by Bill Moyers, public television's own
　　　　  Piers Ploughman, via his phenomenally successful TV series and
　　　　  book-cum-transcript, Healing and the Mind. But in truth, the old
　　　　  philosophe's stiff--which had lain for three centuries in the halls
　　　　  of medicine like some glass-entombed Lenin--had become a bit of an
　　　　  embarrassment.
　　　　  Immortalized in Bartlett's for his inscrutable, Popeye-like
　　　　  declamation, "I think therefore I am," Descartes was history's most
　　　　  persuasive partisan of the mind-body split, a bedrock notion of
　　　　  modern science. Mental events, the savant declared, occur in a
　　　　  separate domain from those of the flesh. Consciousness has no
　　　　  business in the mean streets of matter. As a result, medical science
　　　　  came to be dominated by a materialism so iron-clad that one
　　　　  19th-century theorist felt emboldened to quip that the mind's
　　　　  influence upon the mechanism of the body was like "the steam-whistle
　　　　  which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine but cannot
　　　　  influence its machinery."
　　　　  The problem with this is obvious to anyone who ever had an unseemly
　　　　  thought about their junior-high English teacher and then blushed:
　　　　  "The soul's passions," said Aristotle, who had it right all along,
　　　　  "seem to be linked with a body, as the body undergoes modifications
　　　　  in their presence."
　　　　  By 1900, medical science had at least begun to suspect as much.
　　　　  Freud and Janet's investigations of hysterical paralysis provided a
　　　　  benchmark of the mind's power over the body. Dr. Walter Cannon
　　　　  discovered in the 1930s that the central nervous system controlled
　　　　  many bodily functions and suggested that it in turn was subject to a
　　　　  regulatory mechanism "which in human beings we call the
　　　　  personality."
　　　　  Still, if anyone could be credited with shutting off the
　　　　  refrigeration on Descartes' mortal remains and letting the aroma of
　　　　  a paradigm gone bad reach science's stuffed nostrils, it is Candace
　　　　  Pert, Ph.D., former chief of the Brain Biochemistry Section of the
　　　　  National Institute of Mental Health and codiscoverer of the brain's
　　　　  opiate receptors. Subsequent revelations that similar docking sites