Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

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.

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.

Zing-Yang Kuo (1898-1970), hailed as China's behaviorist psychologist, earned "Out-Watsons Mr. Watson" in the international anti-instinct movement. His contributions to the field on behavioral neuroembryology (1929-1939) are often overlooked in comparison to his achievements in psychology. We retrieved the titles of all of Kuo's publications from 1929 to 1939 and examined those related to his research on the origins and development of embryonic behavioral ontogeny and the neural basis of embryonic behavior. Remarkably, Kuo concurrently focused on embryos during the same period as North American neuroembryologists. He maintained an independent stance in the debate over the sequence of behavioral ontogeny, represented by the embryonic neuroscientists Coghill and Windle, and critically pointed out limitations in research on both sides of the debate. Drawing from his experiments with chicken embryos, Kuo proposed the theory of behavioral epigenesis, which attempted to end the nature-nurture dichotomy and promote the transformation of the research path of behavioral embryology from elementary physiological anatomy toward a deep "comprehensive science." Kuo's achievements directly laid the foundation for the interdisciplinary field of developmental psychobiology, constructing a new conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of behavioral development and promoting the establishment and development of a new approach to epiphenotype epigenetics.

We describe the Italian contribution to the description and treatment of parkinsonism following encephalitis lethargica (EL): postencephalitic parkinsonism (PEP). Special attention is devoted to the description of postencephalitic symptoms by Giuseppe Panegrossi (1871-1953) and to the treatment based on Atropa belladonna introduced in Italy and extensively supported by Arturo Nannizzi (1887-1961), who was charged by the queen of Italy with conducting research into this plant and advocating its cultivation for healing purposes. This article gives us the unique opportunity to revisit the figure of this distinguished botanist, providing a summary of his biography, interests, and achievements.

This article examines the scientific career of Edward Trautner, who did pioneering research in the 1950s on lithium treatment for psychiatric disorders. Trautner was the first scientist to study the mechanism of action of lithium as a psychiatric medication. His research established that lithium could be used safely and rationally, and anticipated by a decade the large volume of research in the 1960s and 1970s that led to international acceptance of lithium treatment for mood disorders. Trautner was a pioneer of biological psychiatry who considered pharmacology to be a useful therapeutical tool rather than a permanent cure for putative chemical imbalances. His research involved cross-disciplinary collaborations that combined clinical and laboratory research in the disciplines of psychiatry, physiology, biochemistry, teratology, and even oncology. Trautner himself had a multidisciplinary background that included publications in literature and philosophy.