Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

In the scientific world, Professor Jean-Martin Charcot is known for his contribution to the establishment of the anatomo-clinical method in neurology in Paris at the Salpêtrière hospital. However, media attention in the late 1800s has focused on his work on hysteria. In this article, we aim to review how he has been depicted in two recent French movies: Augustine (2012) and Le Bal des Folles (The Mad Women's Ball) (2021). We will compare his image in those two films to articles at the time of his death and contrast how he is represented in other biographical works. Both in the newspapers and in the movies, Charcot's public lessons and experimental work on hypnosis in hysteria are put forward. The two movies offer a new perspective, as both directors were women, and both movies focus on a woman patient's journey at La Salpêtrière. His depiction remains superficial in Le Bal des Folles, portraying a cold, insensitive, and despotic approach to patients. He plays a more central role in Augustine, in which he develops intimacy with one of his patients and a more human and caring side is displayed, in parallel to his authoritative and meticulous figure. Both movies refer to him as a divine authority, but they also allude to his scientific method. In summary, Charcot's recent representations in cinema add a woman's perspective to life under Charcot at La Salpêtrière, which continues to shape further the image we have of this founder of modern neurology.

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 (1825-1893) is known to have possessed interesting works of art, e.g. Jan Steen's Marriage at Cana. In 1899, his pupil and colleague Henry Meige (1866-1940) wrote that Charcot had been interested in a painting (after a drawing) by Bruegel, named Les Arracheurs de Pierres de Teste. At the time the painting belonged to Charcot's contemporary Ernest Mesnet (1825-1898). When Charcot visited Mesnet, he offered him a considerable amount of money. The owner did not want to sell it, but promised to leave it to Charcot in his will. As Charcot died earlier than Mesnet, the painting went to the latter's heirs. In 1899, it was possessed by dermatologist dr. Paul de Molènes-Mahon (b. 1857). Meige published an article, in which he criticized the quality of the copy. Surgeon Henri Gaudier (1866-1942) wrote about the original painting in the Museum of St. Omer and confirmed Meige's opinion about the copy. I will illustrate the St. Omer painting and describe Meige's and Gaudier's comments by comparing it with the black & white copy in Meige's 1899 article. My study looks at Charcot as a collector of paintings, which is a minimally studied topic. He may have been interested in the Paris Bruegel copy for clinical and medical-historical reasons, rather than on aesthetic grounds.

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.

The emergence of neurosurgery from the practice of cranial surgery between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries in London, UK, is well documented, including the role of Sir Victor Horsley, the first neurosurgical appointee at the National Hospital Queen Square in 1886. The process of this transition elsewhere in London and the subsequent foundation of other neurosurgical units are less well described. In East London, the status of St. Bartholomew's Hospital (Barts) as the oldest London hospital still active on its original site and its comprehensive archives allow an unusually long history of surgical practice in the specialty to be studied. Using these archives and other primary and secondary sources, this article describes the transition of cranial surgery in East London from the general surgeons, limited to the treatment of brain and skull injury, to the specialized discipline of neurosurgery. We discuss the culmination of this process in the foundation of three neurosurgical units at London Hospital, Whitechapel, by Sir Hugh B. Cairns from 1927; at Barts Hospital, Smithfield, by John E. A. O'Connell from 1937; and at Oldchurch Hospital, Romford, by Leslie C. Oliver from 1945. Two modern neurosurgical units, in Whitechapel and Romford, have taken forward the work begun by this group.

Although the history of treating headaches spans thousands of years, scientists during the tenth century made unique and significant contributions to understanding, treating, and preventing the development of headaches. In fact, the tenth century saw the ability to differentiate between types of headache and treatments for the first time. This article looks at the contributions of Persian, Anglo-Saxon, and Chinese medicine to the diagnosis and treatment of different types of headaches in the tenth century. It does so with reference to a range of herbal, surgical, and pharmacological methods of treating this ailment. The article also uncovers how tenth-century herbal remedies were effective at explaining the properties of their ingredients in modern terms and concepts including analgesia, anti-inflammation, and antinociception, and explores the way tenth-century treatments relieved painful headaches and prevented their recurrence.

On November 8, 1923, William John Adie described an unusual disorder to the Section of Neurology of the Royal Society of Medicine. The condition comprised frequent momentary stereotyped impairments of consciousness that occurred in children, did not respond to antiseizure medications, and did not develop into epilepsy, as that term was then commonly understood, since no convulsive seizures occurred. After some time, the episodes terminated spontaneously, leaving the sufferer unhandicapped and neurologically intact. Almost certainly, Adie had described the present-day entity of childhood absence epilepsy. He termed it "pyknolepsy," knowing that the name "pyknolepsie" had been used for a similar disorder in Germany from 1916 onwards, though not reported elsewhere. Following Adie's account, published in 1924, reports of the disorder appeared in the English and French-language literature and continued to be published in German. It became increasingly accepted that pyknolepsy was a form of epilepsy that was part of Lennox's petit mal triad. The word pyknolepsy itself never became widely used and is now largely forgotten. Adie never took up the topic in print again. However, he had awakened English-language readers to one component in a broadening of the concept of what constituted epilepsy.