Changing graphic representations of the brain from the late middle ages to the present

Abstract

“The brain is in the skull. The brain is in the skull.” When I was a fledgling medical student at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1981, this was the mind-numbing daily mantra intoned as a microphone check before neuroanatomy lectures by research neuroscientist Robin L. Curtis (1926–2020). Curtis would then show image after image of the nervous system, describing elaborate neural pathways and often waxing eloquent about such thenstrange and esoteric topics as “the fields of Forel” (Forel 1877; Horisawa et al 2021; see Figure 1). Many of the images were difficult for neophyte medical students to fully grasp, and some of the material seemed unlikely to have any potential clinical application (or so I thought at the time). Less than four decades later, the fields of Forel are being increasingly considered as potential targets for stereotactic interventions in the treatment of movement disorders, behavioral disorders, and epilepsy (Neudorfer et al. 2017; Neudorfer and Maarouf 2018). Our current multifaceted and multilayered “picture” of the brain developed from the gradual evolution of graphic representations, particularly over the past 500 years, through recursive observation, abstraction, and conceptual interpretation. How such images are presented, even today, varies considerably among different scholars and when presenting material to different audiences. In 2016, the editorial board of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences charged me with the responsibility for developing a special issue on the evolution of graphic representations of the brain. I had begun work on this topic in 2012 with studies related to plagiarisms of Andreas Vesalii’s (1543) by Juan Valverde de Hamusco and Geminus (Thomas Lambert or Lambrit); followed in 2014 by studies of the evolution of Vesalius’s representations of the brain in the period from 1538 to 1555; and then, finally, from 2016 to the present, by a much-expanded survey of the development of neuroanatomy and depictions of the brain (Lanska 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2018d, 2018e; Lanska and Lanska 2013a, 2013b, 2014). Some aspects of this program of study were presented as special museum exhibits at the Dittrick Medical History Center for the 2018 meeting of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN), which was held in