Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

Jean-Marin Charcot died unexpectedly on August 16, 1893, at the age of 67, while on a journey to the Morvan for a short holiday with colleagues and friends. This article reports in detail circumstances of Charcot's journey, and his untimely death in a small and modest room in a secluded hotel in the French countryside. In Part 1, I describe the reasons for Charcot's choice to go on the journey, with an emphasis on his role in the recent and controversial "Panama Affair." Subsequently, I describe the first days of the vacation journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and walking as he visited castles, churches, and an archeological museum. During this holiday, Charcot's companions got to know his great versatility: He was interested in history, antiques, excavations from the prehistory, languages, literature, painting, architecture, nature, and horticulture. In Part 2, I narrate Charcot's sudden death. Additionally, I pay attention to the different reports in the press, the difficult and long journey of the corpse back to Paris, and the religious funeral, followed by the walk to Charcot's final resting place in the Montmartre Cemetery.

During 1881-1895, a small number of male patients-18 in total-were diagnosed with hysteria at the University of Tartu Psychiatric Hospital. Rather than constituting an obscure psychiatric institution on the margins of European medical traditions, Tartu during these years witnessed the arrival of several influential psychiatrists: Hermann Emminghaus (1845-1904), Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), and Vladimir Chizh (1855-1922). Yet, when comparing patient case records of male hysteria written by doctors who also published journal articles and medical textbooks on the topic, one can detect a clear inconsistency between the theory and practice of psychiatry at an important moment of its formation. Contrary to the simplified characterizations in the textbooks, there was no uniform formulation of male hysteria in the case records. The clinical description differed remarkably, throughout the career of individual doctors, between symptomology presented in a textbook and clinical picture described in a patient record, and between different doctors who practiced in the same clinic during this 15-year period. This study highlights the importance of using patient case records in conjunction with a formal medical treatise to provide new insights and nuances to the intellectual history of hysteria, but also other diagnoses and clinical practice more broadly.

Jean-Martin Charcot believed that "miraculous" cures followed the rules of nature and that the resolution of physical stigmata after pilgrimages to shrines followed the laws of physiology. He acknowledged that some of the patients he had failed to improve at La Salpêtrière had subsequently been cured by the "faith cure" at Lourdes, but he believed their recovery had occurred through "autosuggestion." Although this term is more commonly associated with his collaborator Pierre Janet, it is clearly expressed in Charcot's final pronouncements. Charcot's recognition of the neurological origin of hysteria is central to contemporary ideas about the cause of functional neurological disorders, and even some components of his once derided treatment approach-including mental training, graded exercise, and medical hypnotism-are in vogue.

In the neurosciences, concepts play an important role in the conception and direction of research. Among the theoretical notions and direction of research, plasticity stands out because of the multiple ways in which scientists use it to describe and interpret how the nervous system changes and adapts to different requirements. The occurrence of different conceptualizations of plasticity in the scientific literature during the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present was investigated using bibliometric methods. Throughout the period analyzed, synaptic plasticity has remained the dominant conceptualization of plasticity. However, scientists have continued to introduce novel plasticity concepts reflecting the scientific advances they have made in understanding the dynamic nature of the nervous system. The conceptual evolution of plasticity documents that the view of the adult nervous system as immutable has been replaced by an understanding of the nervous system as capable of lifelong change and adaptation.

In the course of researching and writing the first-ever book length biography of Edward Graeme Robertson's (1903-1975) eventful life and career in Australasian neurology, a rare 1933 cinema film recording of National Hospital staff at Queen Square has recently been rediscovered. Graeme completed his residency in neurology at Queen Square in the early 1930s and maintained close connections with his colleagues in London, thoughtfully recording them at different times using early movie cameras. Two versions of Graeme's 1933 film have been preserved, and there are also other color clips of his colleagues from later in life in the UCL Neurology archives and Robertson family collection. These remarkable films contain images of several historically significant neurologists, including Gordon Morgan Holmes (1876-1965), Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson (1878-1937), Derek Denny-Brown (1901-1981), Macdonald Critchley (1900-1997), and several others. We provide a contextual summary of the many clips recorded alongside an in-depth inventory of all the personalities represented in the 1933 film. Selected photographs are used to indicate the contents of these remarkable films.

In November 1881, the eminent physiologist and physician David Ferrier was prosecuted under the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876. The prosecution was raised by the Victoria Street Society, formerly known as the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, through its activist founder, Frances Power Cobbe. This article examines the legislative context prior to Ferrier's trial, the personalities involved in the prosecution, and its course and outcome. The resultant impact, both personal, on Cobbe and Ferrier, and professional, on experimental neurophysiology, is discussed, in particular the foundation of the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research (AAMR) and the provision of legal support for medical practitioners subject to litigation.

Thomas Hun (1808-1896)-along with his sons Edward (1842-1880) and Henry (1854-1924)-were prime movers in establishing the clinical practice and academic discipline of neurology in the Hudson River Valley of New York in the ninteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This article outlines the life of the family's semi-aristocratic patriarch, beginning with Thomas's unusual educational background and his six-year post-graduate hiatus in Paris of the 1830s, where he came under the influence of P. C. A. Louis (1787-1872). It lays out his subsequent career as professor of the Institutes of Medicine and ultimately as dean of an American medical school that was not situated in a major metropolis. It also will demonstrate how Thomas Hun's career as a medical practitioner, academician, neurophilosopher, and "proto-neurologist" recapitulates the evolution of clinical and academic neurology in nineteenth-century America.

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.

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.