Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

This study examines the master-disciple relationship between Jean-Martin Charcot and his Japanese pupil, Kinnosuke Miura, during Charcot's last few years of life. Although Miura's period of study under Charcot lasted only eight months, he revered Charcot as his lifelong mentor. Based on the biographical accounts written by Miura's children and grandchild, we provide an overview of Miura's life and examine his depictions of Charcot's character, clinical style, and diagnostic approaches. We then explore why Miura continued to regard Charcot as his lifelong mentor, despite the brevity of his training. Finally, we discuss the profound impact of French neurology, as established by Charcot, on the evolution of clinical neurology in Japan.

The specialization of cortical function for language was proposed by Paul Broca (1824-1880) in 1861 and further elaborated to include the principle of hemispheric lateralization in 1865. Broca and other French colleagues argued for and against these hypotheses, employing clinical and pathological observations of individuals with acquired language disorders as evidence. These ideas became a topic of widespread interest after the debates at the Paris Academy of Medicine in 1865 were reported internationally. During this period until the end of the decade, hundreds of publications appeared on the localization and laterality of findings in aphasic individuals and case series. Several large-scale systematic reviews of historic (pre-1861) and contemporary (post-1861) clinical findings were published only a few years after the syndrome had been proposed. These aimed to determine the strength and quality of evidence regarding the specialization and lateralization of brain areas for language. However, their authors held distinct theoretical assumptions and ideological concerns and were motivated by varied research questions. These comprehensive efforts using systematic review methodology to assess the evidence for and against hypotheses about the organization of language in the brain are examined to expose the issues of live debate in early neuroscience.

This article describes how Pierre Marie developed a radiographic method to localize functional areas in the brain of French World War I soldiers having sustained a penetrating craniocerebral injury. The brains cadavers were removed from their skulls and lead wires were placed in the Rolandic, Sylvian, and calcarine fissures, and major sulci. The brains were returned into their skulls and x-rays were taken using the same size and magnification used clinically in visually impaired or aphasic soldiers. The position of the wires outlining the fissures and sulci were averaged and traced on a sheet of transparent paper, on which the gyri were labeled, thus creating an idealized brain map. The transparent brain map was placed over an injured soldier's skull x-ray, and both were placed on an x-ray viewer, revealing the site of the skull fracture overlying the cortical injury in relation to brain map. Marie was the first to apply new technology--radiology, tolocalise functional areas of the brain. Using this method, Marie andhis collaborators discovered the role of the calcarine cortex invision and formulated a new theory of aphasia.

Along with his father Thomas (1808-96) and brother Edward (1842-1880), Henry Hun (1854-1924) was the final member of a family of physicians who helped establish the clinical specialty and academic discipline of neurology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Educated at Yale and with an MD from Harvard, he spent three years in Heidelberg, Vienna, and Paris, studying under Meynert and Charcot. On returning to the United States, he succeeded his brother as Albany Medical College's Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System, a title he held for the next three decades. He authored numerous papers and achieved national prominence as president of the American Neurological Association (ANA) in 1914. In 1897, he described the clinical and neuropathological correlations in a form of stroke that came to be known as Wallenberg syndrome. His most famous work was An Atlas of the Differential Diagnosis of the Diseases of the Nervous System, which went through three editions from 1913 through 1922. Following the upheaval produced by the Flexner Report of 1910, Hun abruptly resigned his academic position in 1914 and spent the final 10 years of his life in private practice.

Pierre Henri Stanislas d'Escayrac de Lauture (1826-1868), a French aristocrat, was primarily an explorer with a keen interest in geography, science, and languages. He traveled extensively in North Africa, where he experienced both mirages and hallucinatory phenomena, which he termed "ragle" after an Arabic word. These hallucinations likely stemmed from sleep deprivation, though other factors may have contributed. In a memoir presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1855, d'Escayrac provided the first precise description of desert hallucinations, distinguishing them from the already known mirages. This article provides a summary of d'Escayrac's adventurous life, his observations on ragle, and a commentary on them in the context of current knowledge of sleep-related hallucinations, and other possible contributing factors.

Agostino Gemelli, an Italian Franciscan physician and psychologist, was a pioneer in aviation psychology and spatial orientation research in the early twentieth century. This historical article explores Gemelli's groundbreaking contributions to understanding spatial cognition, particularly in aviation contexts, decades before contemporary scientific findings. During World War I, Gemelli, a medical officer and pilot, focused on selecting pilots based on their attitudes rather than their physical abilities. His work predated crucial developments in spatial cognition, including concepts of field dependence/independence and environmental representation. Gemelli examined perception through Gestalt psychology, showing that people create mental images of space instead of just recording what they see. Gemelli critically analyzed spatial orientation, distinguishing between ground and aerial navigation and recognizing the complex interaction between internal cognitive characteristics and external environmental factors. He anticipated modern research on spatial representation, emphasizing the dynamic nature of spatial perception and individual differences in cognitive processing. This article highlights Gemelli's insights in relation to modern science, showcasing his keen understanding of spatial cognition, pilot skills, and perception. His contributions, largely ignored after World War II, were an important early exploration of the cognitive mechanisms behind spatial orientation and aviation psychology.

This article examines Dante da Maiano's response to Dante Alighieri's dream in the Vita Nova, often seen as a mocking reply to the young poet's vision. Building on Bruno Nardi's reinterpretation (1959), which suggests a medical explanation rather than mere ridicule, this study analyzes the sonnet through medieval physiological and medical theories. Dante da Maiano's diagnosis, influenced by Galenic and Aristotelian thought, links the poet's delirious dream to harmful vapors rising from the testicles to the brain. These vapors, produced by excessive heat and imbalance in the reproductive organs, were thought to cause mental disturbances by drying out the brain, a common medieval explanation for lovesickness. The article highlights the conceptual connection between the brain and the testicles, recognized in medieval medical theory, especially in the works of Galen and Albert the Great. By situating Dante da Maiano's response within this scientific framework, the article reinterprets his advice-like washing the testicles to mitigate harmful vapors-as a serious medical recommendation rather than as derision. This perspective enhances our understanding of the interplay between physical health and mental states in medieval thought, offering fresh insights into Dante's dream and its broader medical and philosophical implications.

Currently, the idea that the brain is a complex network of interacting brain regions is hardly controversial. The rapid development of this field is often attributed to the emergence of powerful brain-imaging techniques and, around the millennium, the merging of the neuroscience of brain networks with modern mathematical graph theory. However, little is known about the historical roots of this concept. It is interesting to know when the first traces of a concept of brain networks can be found in the work of early neuroscientists, how this concept evolved over time, and what factors may have influenced this evolution. This study aims to set a first step in addressing these questions by a detailed analysis of David Ferrier's classic study, The Functions of the Brain. From this analysis it will become clear that, in addition to a clear notion of localized functions in the brain, Ferrier speculated in several places about the need for several of these brain regions to communicate and interact in order to bring about higher brain functions. He referred to this perspective on the brain as a "complex whole," which could be interpreted as an early precursor of the modern concept of brain networks.

Ivane Beritashvili has been regarded as an "anti-Pavlovian" for nearly a century. One respect in which Beritashvili is said to be anti-Pavlovian is in granting an explanatory role to subjective mental states in his doctrine of image-driven behavior. In this article, I aim to problematize the anti-Pavlovian assessment and argue that Beritashvili did not deviate from Pavlovian scientific norms, minor points of theoretical and methodological differences between them notwithstanding. Furthermore, several respects in which Beritashvili is claimed to be anti-Pavlovian are ways in which he resembles Pavlov. Turning my attention to Beritashvili's critics in the Soviet Union, those responsible for his censure, I argue that it is the critique of Beritashvili that runs counter to the norms Pavlov embraced. I contest the claim that his alleged deviations from Pavlovian orthodoxy justify classification as anti-Pavlovian in a sense that is either historically accurate or philosophically interesting, and submit that the grounds on which Beritashvili is derided as anti-Pavlovian would also justify labeling Pavlov himself as anti-Pavlovian. Informed by the case of Beritashvili and others who were politically persecuted for their scientific work in the Soviet Union, I conclude with reflections on science, politics, and the intrusion of the latter in the former.