Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

The story of David Ferrier's demonstration at the International Medical Congress in London in August 1881 of a monkey experimentally rendered hemiplegic by a focal surgical brain lesion-prompting Charcot's observation, "C'est un malade!"-is well known as a seminal event in the history of the localization of functions in the cerebral cortex. Less well known is the fact that, on the same occasion, Ferrier demonstrated a second monkey, known as monkey F, apparently deaf as a consequence of bilateral temporo-sphenoidal brain lesions. The purpose of this article is, first, to give a chronological account of this demonstration and subsequent related events, including Ferrier's trial under the Vivisection Act, the publication of the pathological findings in the animal's brain, the dispute about the localization of the "auditory centre" with Edward Schäfer, and the first glimmerings of human homologues of cortical deafness. Second, we briefly reappraise Ferrier's findings in light of current concepts of the central substrates of complex sound processing.

The knee jerk reflex, emblematic of neurology and central to clinical practice, marks its 150th anniversary in 2025. First introduced to the neurological literature in 1875 through independent reports by Wilhelm Erb and Carl Westphal, this reflex has since evolved from a clinical curiosity to a diagnostic staple, although its initial interpretation was debated. Erb viewed it as a spinal reflex, whereas Westphal questioned its reflex nature, considering mechanical muscle excitation. Early pioneers such as John Hughlings Jackson, Victor Horsley, and Charles Sherrington made significant contributions to understanding the knee jerk's physiology, exploring its diagnostic relevance, its relation to spinal cord function, and its afferent pathways. These investigations established the knee jerk as a cornerstone of neurological examination, exemplifying the integration of clinical observation with experimental science.

Edward Reynolds Hun is easily eclipsed by his father, Thomas (1808-1896), and his younger brother, Henry (1854-1924), in historical accounts of the evolution of neurology as a clinical specialty and academic discipline in nineteenth-century America. His early educational pathway, including a postgraduate year in Paris, was typical for sons of the wealthy seeking a medical degree. On his return from Europe, he embarked on a research career in neuropsychiatry seeking to uncover biochemical and pathological underpinnings for psychiatric disorders. In addition to standard postmortem examinations, he used the most up-to-date technological advances such as sphygmography. He was also one of the first Americans to publish photomicrographs of muscle obtained by biopsy. In his mid-30s he became a charter member of the American Neurological Association and was appointed professor of diseases of the nervous system at Albany Medical College. His health then rapidly deteriorated, leading to his early death at age 37 of an unclear neurologic disorder. His career intersected with those of other notables in late-nineteenth-century American neurology, including John P. Gray, William A. Hammond, Edward Constant Séguin, and Edward Charles Spitzka.

Robert Daroff (1936-2025) was one of the most influential neurologists of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Following education at Ivy League research universities, Daroff was the first U.S. neurologist to serve in a frontline combat unit during the Vietnam war. Subsequently, when neuro-ophthalmology was exclusively an ophthalmology subspecialty, Daroff pioneered neuro-ophthalmology as a subspecialty of neurology, training with neuro-ophthalmologists Lawton Smith and William Hoyt. Daroff then established his own pioneering Ocular Motor Laboratory in Miami in conjunction with Louis Dell'Osso. Daroff introduced the simultaneous binocular recording of each eye separately, allowing identification of dysmetria in normal and diseased individuals, and ultimately measurement and modeling of pathology in the pursuit and saccadic systems. After his appointment as neurology chairman at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (1980), he became a national and international leader in neurology, making fundamental contributions to neurologic education and oversight of scientific integrity, and the subdisciplines of neuro-ophthalmology, headache, and neurotology. As Editor-in-Chief of Neurology, Daroff garnered national recognition for boldly addressing allegations of scientific misconduct. Although holding many high-profile roles, including as president of both the American Neurological Association and the American Headache Society, Daroff considered his greatest medical legacy to be the residents he trained.

Jean-Martin Charcot is considered the founding father of modern neurology. There are many general and specialized biographies about him, the result being that a new text is unexpected or would likely amount to plagiarism. However, part of the duties for Charcot's medical professorship have not, to date, been studied at all. This article will focus on the role of Charcot as a member of doctorate juries and, in particular, as the president of these juries. I have reviewed around 12,500 theses one by one. These were defended at the Paris medical school from 1862, Charcot's first year as an agrégé (assistant professor), to his death in 1893. Among the theses, I have selected all of those that discuss neuropsychiatry in the broadest terms (3,663). I have paid particular attention to all of those for which Charcot was part of the jury. This involves 608 theses. All of the data were entered in a database (Filemaker) to facilitate identifying those theses corresponding to one or more of the criteria. Statistical comparisons were then carried out (Excel spreadsheet). In addition to these results, brief individualized surveys were conducted on theses selected for their representativeness, either for the subject matter (multiple sclerosis, aphasia, tabes, general paralysis, etc.) or for specific criteria (foreigners, women, etc.), but all of the theses were defended before a jury that included Charcot. This makes it possible to track how the areas of study in the medical world changed over time, and particularly those of Charcot. The juries Charcot was obliged to be a part of, without any particular ties to the candidate and/or any involvement in the selection and supervision of the work, must be differentiated from the thesis juries for his students. In the latter case, the thesis subjects were most often linked to Charcot's researches. Providing a thesis subject was motivated, in certain cases, by the desire to disseminate new data in the medical profession, not only by dint of the theses themselves but also through the reports that the medical press published regularly (e.g. the diagnosis of various types of shaking) and through the commercial publication of these data, in some cases with a preface by Charcot. In other cases, the thesis was a step in the long process of developing a theory (hysteria). Or it led to a flowering of new ideas, insufficiently proven, which Charcot would only cover in his Lessons once there was convincing confirmation (amyotrophy). This rich cornucopia gives rise to certain neglected nuggets, as well as works that have entered the classical corpus-for example, the theses of Léopold Ordenstein, Ivan Poumeau, Isaac Bruhl, Albert Gombault, and Pierre Janet.

Jean-Martin Charcot's 1883 lectures on aphasia at the Salpêtrière Hospital were seen as the starting point for the development of a psychology in the work of the famous neurologist. In his lectures, Charcot set out a theory of language function at the cerebral level, distinguishing between the different centers involved in speech production and those necessary for reading. His lectures, which also postulated the independence of ideas from words, were to resonate beyond aphasia specialists, and particularly with alienists. To document this dimension of the reception of neurology in the field of psychiatry, this article refers to Jules Séglas's synthesis on Les troubles du langage chez les aliénés, published in 1892, which summarized the knowledge acquired during the nineteenth century about modifications of expression in madness and whose original ideas were to mark the psychiatric semiology of the early-twentieth century. The analysis details how Séglas cited and adapted Charcot's conceptions to explain the production of incomprehensible speech in idiocy and the formation of hallucinations, thus contributing to the spread of the neurologist's model among his fellow alienists.

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.

Biographies, articles, and meetings devoted to the founder of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot, are typically dithyrambic, if not hagiographic. It seems that the striking professional and familial qualities of Charcot have erased any other characteristic of the person, and scratches on the Master image commonly have not been well accepted. With this in mind, it is interesting to present and evaluate the rather negative opinions on Charcot by the famous French writer Léon Daudet, who initially was very close to the Charcots through his father, Alphonse Daudet, and who wrote rather extensively on Charcot in his diary and memoirs. Our point is not to underline these writings as the "truth" about Charcot's personality and life (Daudet, who was a prominent extreme right-wing figure, was known to exaggerate and play with his sharp opinions), but Daudet's criticisms paradoxically provide a fascinating perspective, which may help to reconstruct better who Charcot really was in counterbalancing a bit the overcrowded, politically correct, praising group.

In 1908, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch-already famous for The Scream and other paintings showing sickness, despair, and suffering-put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, a nerve doctor in Copenhagen. Jacobson had previously attended some of Jean-Martin Charcot's lectures in Paris, as had Knud Pontoppidan, his mentor. Munch, in turn, had long been showing signs and symptoms of an anxiety disorder and what might have been viewed as neurasthenia or hysteria. Now, he also seemed to be suffering from acute alcoholic toxicity. In this article, we explore Scandinavian psychiatry at the turn of the century; Jacobson and Pontoppidan's connections to Paris; and how some of Munch's treatments, most notably his electrotherapy sessions, related to therapeutics at La Salpêtrière. Additionally, various ways in which Munch learned about French medicine are examined. This material reveals how well-known and influential Charcot and his ideas about disorders of the brain and mind had become at the turn of the century, affecting not just the French physicians but also a world-famous artist and his nerve doctor in Scandinavia.