Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

Scholars usually consider the Historia anatomica corporis humani, published in 1600 by André du Laurens, as an obsolete defense of Galenic principles against the novelty of Vesalian material. Although du Laurens's book plagiarized many illustrations from Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543), critics such as Choulant insisted that the Historia's iconography had "no particular anatomical or artistic value." However, four of the Historia's engravings appear to be original. One of these, the Tabula hæc veram spinalis medullae et nervorum ab ea prodeuntium effigiem exprimit, is now famous for depicting the intradural spinal nerves as a horsetail, leading to the addition of the term cauda equina to the anatomical lexicon. A less flamboyant figure from the same plate shows small blood vessels coursing over the surface of the cervical spinal cord. This drawing may be the first published depiction of anterior spinal arteries and veins.

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) showed little interest in mental disorders, the domain of nineteenth-century alienists. But hallucinations are not confined to the field of psychiatry, and Charcot, who had once tested the hallucinogenic effects of hashish in his youth, went on to describe hallucinations in the course of various neurological conditions as just another semiological element. Most of his or his disciples' writings on hallucinations can be found in his work on hysteria. Hallucinations and delusions were part of "grand hysteria" and occurred at the end of the attack (third or fourth phase). Hypnosis or chemical agents could also induce hallucinations. Charcot and his disciples did not go so far as to emphasize the importance of hallucinations when they evoked past trauma, especially sexual trauma. Charcot's materialistic orientation led him and his disciples-especially D. M. Bourneville (1840-1909), G. Gilles de la Tourette (1857-1904), and the neurologist and artist P. Richer (1849-1833)-to seek hysteria in artistic representations of "possessed women" and in the visions of nuns and mystics. Finally, Charcot recognized the importance of hallucinations in neurological semiology, by means of precise and relevant observations scattered throughout his work. Preoccupied with linking hysteria to neurology, Charcot only scratched the surface of the possible significance of hallucinations in this context, paving the way for the work of his students Pierre Janet (1859-1947) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) did not show much interest in the peripheral nervous system and its associated pathologies. He found it difficult to place the peripheral nerve within his classification of disorders; it appeared to be an exception to his theories. Even the pathology that he described in 1886 with Pierre Marie (1853-1940), at the same time as Henry Tooth (1856-1925), and which is now known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathy, was considered by Charcot to be a potential myelopathy. Charcot, like other physicians, paid little heed to the observations made by Louis Duménil (1823-1890) to support the existence of primitive damage to the peripheral nerve. Charcot approached peripheral nerve pathologies through two indirect routes: amyotrophies not explained by spinal or muscular damage, and the trophic cutaneous consequences of what he called névrites (neuritis), the lesional site of which remains debated. It is noteworthy that Charcot's approach to peripheral nervous system disorders differed from that of other neurologists of the same time. Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke (1859-1927) in France was more precise than Charcot in her anatomical and clinical descriptions, and Hugo von Ziemssen (1829-1902) in Germany made effective use of electrodiagnostics. Charcot supported the electrical work of Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875), whom he sometimes presented as one of his mentors. The German physician Wilhelm Erb (1840-1921) developed electrodiagnosis by galvanic and faradic currents. Charcot never made use of Erb's electrological advancements. With his electrophysiologist Romain Vigouroux (1831-1911), Charcot used medical electricity only for electrotherapy in hysteria.

Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to organic neurology. However, his pursuit of hysteria, the most prevalent diagnosis in his hospital clinic, yielded no anatomical lesion to account for hysteria's plethora of somatic disorders assumed due to a purely functional or dynamic lesion in the cerebral cortex. This led Charcot to turn his attention to the psychology of hysteria. Taking advantage of institutional reforms at the Salpêtrière-notably, the establishment of his professorship in nervous diseases-Charcot from the early 1880s focused his teaching increasingly on case histories of hysteria in male as well as female patients. Already renown for his earlier dramatic public lessons on female hysteria, his lessons of the 1880s, of which two volumes were published at the end of the decade, elaborated the issue of psychology in terms of altered states of patient's suggestibility. By the decade's end, Charcot's worldwide reputation rested on the prospects of this work as acknowledged by numerous students, notably medical psychologists Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. Yet Charcot's views remained sketchy. They were discussed at length in his unpublished notes for a lesson intended for May 1893, just a few months before his sudden death. His unpublished notes reveal a detailed case for dreams as illustrating a psychological mechanism underlying hysteria in a 17-year-old Paris artisan. I conclude by considering why this significant climactic case of Charcot's might have been overlooked by his entourage.

Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) pioneered the use of visual aids in his lectures at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. He deployed photographs, casts, diagrams, graphs, drawings, lantern slides, and even patients to help the audience understand his innovative diagnoses, but that same visual imagery also informed his own conceptualizations of pathology. Charcot, whom Sigmund Freud famously called a "visuel," made drawings of his patients and their autopsied organs while also encouraging the art-making of his many collaborators and protégés at the Salpêtrière in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their "scientific artworks" epitomize the entanglement of art and medical science at the hospital. This article examines the role of visual media in diagnosing pathology under Charcot's aegis, bringing to light images and objects that catalogue the case of Ambroise Bourdy. Here was a perfect example of the male hysteric, according to Charcot: a "robust" blacksmith and father who developed a hysterical contracture after a workplace injury. In 1882, Charcot's Salpêtrière colleagues-including Dr. Henri Parinaud, Dr. Paul Richer, Louis Loreau, and Albert Londe-tested Bourdy's eyes, made drawings and a cast of his contracted left hand, and photographed him in various poses. The surfeit of visual imagery of Bourdy purports to illustrate traumatic hysteria-however, it more effectively, if unintentionally, reveals a delight in art-making at the Salpêtrière.

Jean-Martin Charcot, often lauded for his seminal contributions, is seldom critiqued for his blunders. One such blunder was his double-semidecussation scheme for the retinocortical visual pathways, proposed in 1875 to explain, on neuroanatomic grounds, cases of hysteria that manifest hysterical amblyopia accompanied with ipsilateral hemianaesthesia. Charcot's scheme was inconsistent with the older, broadly correct scheme of Prussian ophthalmologist Albrecht von Gräfe. Charcot failed to perform clinicopathologic correlation studies. His analysis relied on a series of mistaken conclusions he made in conjunction with Swiss-French ophthalmologist Edmund Landolt: (1) only an optic tract lesion could produce a homonymous hemianopsia; (2) cerebral lesions, if they ever produced homonymous hemianopsia, did so by secondary effects (e.g. pressure) on the optic tracts; and (3) damage to the cortical projections from the lateral geniculate produces a crossed amblyopia. Challenges to Charcot's theory came from within France by 1880. By 1882, Charcot recognized that his scheme was erroneous, and he approved a thesis by his pupil Charles Féré that reverted to Gräfe's scheme with an ill-conceived modification to accommodate Charcot's concept of hysterical cerebral amblyopia. A critique by American neurologist Moses Starr in 1884 argued for Gräfe's scheme and refuted Charcot's erroneous scheme and its subsequent derivatives.

The history of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-also known as Charcot's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, and motor neuron disease (MND)-freezes the texts of the scientist and physician Jean-Martin Charcot in a hagiographic narrative describing a brilliant discovery, based on the anatomo-clinical method. This narrative is often used by biologists and physicians as a reference point. This article shows that the use of the hagiographic register faces limitations. In particular, it obscures points of interest from Charcot's texts on ALS, such as the epistemological and ontological implications of scientific plurality in medicine. Although Charcot recognized the importance of scientific plurality in medicine, he prioritized the approaches and conferred the most important epistemic authority on clinical and pathological observations. In his view, animal modeling remains secondary to the understanding of disease. The concept of ALS and its diagnostic operability are the result of symptoms and lesions. By studying the past, we can highlight the specific features of the present. Today, although the ALS concept retains its diagnostic and clinical relevance, it is increasingly called into question in etiological and mechanistic research. Despite these differences, Charcot's reflections are a reminder of the importance of theoretical thinking on scientific plurality, all the more so today in the context of ALS research, in which combining different approaches is increasingly valued to understand the phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity of ALS.

The Polish Institute for Brain Research was established in Warsaw in 1928 to support scientific research on the brain and its functions. The director of the institute was Maksymilian Rose (1883-1937), a distinguished Polish neurologist and neuroanatomist, a disciple of Oskar Vogt and Korbinian Brodmann. In 1931, the Institute was moved from Warsaw to Vilnius. The Institute was well-known in Europe at the time because of the research in the fields of neuroscience, clinical neurology, and psychiatry, as well as the cytoarchitectonic analysis of social activists' brains-a fashionable, neophrenological way to link the mental functions of deceased geniuses with the cellular composition of their central nervous systems. In 1939, the work of the Institute was interrupted by World War II; some of the preparations and materials were moved from Vilnius to Warsaw, some were stored in Vilnius, and some were lost. In this article, we analyze the primary and secondary sources, some of which were obscure for over 80 years, and evaluate the most important scientific achievements of the Polish Institute for Brain Research, as well as its legacy in the early period of modern neuroscience and neurology in interwar Vilnius.