1969
Josef Gerstmann (1887–1969) graduated at the Medical University in Vienna in 1912. He worked there with Julius Wagner von Jauregg (1857–1940), lectured in neurology and psychiatry, and became a professor in 1930. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, working in Ohio, Washington, and New York, where he died in 1969. He published his best-known paper on finger-agnosia in 1924. The Gerstmann syndrome is characterized by finger agnosia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and left-right syndrome and has been associated with damage to the inferior parietal lobe of the dominant hemisphere.
American neurophysiologist Warren Sturgish McCullough (1898–1969) and logician and computer scientist Walter Pitts (1923–1969) both passed away in 1969. McCulloch and Pitts created computational models based on mathematical algorithms called threshold logic, which split the inquiry into two distinct approaches, one focused on biological processes in the brain (single cell recording) and the other on the application of neural networks to artificial intelligence.
Johannes Maagaard Nielsen (1890–1969), born in Aarslev, Denmark, moved to the United States in 1896. He became clinical professor of neurology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was one of the founders of the Society of Biological Psychiatry and was its president from 1947 to 1948. In 1936, he published Agnosia, Apraxia, Aphasia: Their Value in Cerebral Localization, a textbook for neurologists.
The Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1969 by Ralph W. Gerard (1900–1974), an American neurophysiologist and behavioral scientist. The first annual meeting of the society was held in Washington, D.C., in 1971, and it was attended by 1,396 scientists. The Society publishes the Journal of Neuroscience.
In 1969, Suzuki Jiro and Takaku Akira published their study on “cerebrovascular moyamoya disease.” The disease produces an abnormal net-like blood vessel picture, characterized with the Japanese word moyamoya—an expression for something hazy like a puff of cigarette smoke drifting in the air.
That same year, a case report of a patient with a selective impairment of auditory verbal short-term memory was presented in Brain by British neuropsychologists Elizabeth Warrington and Tim Shallice. This case triggered a completely different view of the role of short-term memory, now becoming a working memory.
1919
Scottish ophthalmologist James Hinshelwood (1859–1919) joined the staff of the newly opened Glasgow Eye Infirmary in 1891. He became a lecturer in ophthalmology at the Glasgow Western Medical School and was a pioneer on “word-blindness.”
Luigi Luciani (1842–1919) was an Italian physiologist. In 1879, he spent half a year with German physiologist Carl Ludwig (1816–1895), whom he regarded as his “real master.” In 1885, he, along with Giuseppe Seppilli (1838–1939), published Le localizzazioni funzionali del cervello (The Functional Localizations in the Brain). The book contains historical, epistemological, and experimental arguments for the localization of functions in the brain.
Italian psychiatrist and neurologist Augusto Tamburini (1848–1919) was professor of psychiatry at the University of Padua, head of the psychiatric clinic in Modena, and head of the Psychiatric Institute San Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia. He also directed the psychiatric clinic in Rome and was the editor of the Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria and Medicina Legale (Experimental Journal of Psychiatry and Forensic Medicine) from 1877 to 1918.
German neuropsychiatrist Franz Nissl (1860–1919) discovered a new technique for coloring nerve cells as a medical student in 1884 and provided a published account a decade later. He worked with Alois Alzheimer (1864–1915) in Frankfurt and collaborated with Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), who supervised his dissertation in Heidelberg. In 1918, he accepted Kraepelin’s invitation to work at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich.
Hermann Oppenheim (1858-1919) was a leading neurologists in Germany. He was assistant to Karl Westphal (1833–1890) at the Charité-Hospital in Berlin. In 1894, his textbook on nervous diseases appeared, titled Lehrbuch der Nervenkrankheiten für Ärzte und Studierende (Textbook of Nervous Diseases for Doctors and Students). With surgeon Fedor Krause (1857–1937), he reported the first successful removal of a pineal tumor. He coined the term “dystonia musculorum deformans” for a type of childhood torsion disease he described, a disorder that was later to become known as Ziehen-Oppenheim syndrome, named along with German psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen (1862–1950).
Swedish physician and anatomist Gustaf Magnus Retzius (1842–1919; ) received an extraordinary professorship in histology at the Karolinska Institute in 1877 and an ordinary professorship in anatomy there in 1889. He was specifically interested in the histology of the sense organs and made important contributions to anatomical descriptions of the muscles of the eardrum, the bones of the middle ear, and the Eustachian tube. He was a Nobel Prize nominee 23 times in 11 different years from 1901 to 1916.
Figure 1. Gustav Retzius (1842–1919).
Godfrey Hounsfield (1919–2004), born in Newark, England, developed the revolutionary computerized tomography method of obtaining computer-processed brain images that allow the viewer a virtual look inside the brain. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Karl Pribram (1919–2015) worked with Karl Lashley (1980–1958) at the Yerkes Primate Center, of which he was to become director later. He was professor at Yale University and at Stanford University. He did pioneering work on the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific association cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. He is best known for his development of the holonomic brain model of cognitive function, described in his 1991 Brain and Perception.
Walter E. Dandy (1886–1946), one of the founding fathers of neurosurgery, introduced a method for “intraspinous” injection of air, pneumoencephalography, in 1919. It allowed for the radiological visualization of tumor-induced changes of both the ventricular system and the cerebral subarachnoid space. For this contribution, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1933 by Hans Christian Jacobaeus, chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute.
French neurologist Jean-Alexandre Barré (1880–1967), best known for an early description of acute immune-mediated inflammatory polyradiculoneuropathy (Guillain-Barré syndrome), published in 1919 his paper “Manoeuvre de la jambe” (“Leg Maneuver”), explaining what is called Barré’s leg test, an examination technique for suspected lower-limb weakness.
Salomon Eberhard. Henschen (1847–1930) published in 1919 his paper “Ueber Sprach- Musik- und Rechenmechanismen und ihre Localisation im Gehirn” (“On Speech, Music and Calculation Mechanisms and Their Localization in the Brain”), in which he defined acalculia as a specific disorder in calculation due to a lesion of the angular gyrus.
1869
Czechoslovakian Jan Evangelista Purkyně (1787–1869; ) died in 1869. He was one of the best-known scientists of his time. He graduated from Charles University in Prague with a degree in medicine, and was appointed professor of physiology. In 1819, he discovered the Purkinje effect, the human eye’s much reduced sensitivity to dim red light compared to dim blue light. He published two volumes, Observations and Experiments Investigating the Physiology of Senses (1819) and New Subjective Reports About Vision (1825), which contributed to the emergence of the science of experimental psychology. He is best known for his 1837 discovery of Purkinje cells, large neurons with many branching dendrites found in the cerebellum. He is also known for his discovery in 1839 of Purkinje fibers, the fibrous tissue that conducts electrical impulses from the atrioventricular node to all parts of the ventricles of the heart. He was also the first to describe and illustrate, in 1838, the intracytoplasmic pigment neuromelanin in the substantia nigra. He created the world’s first department of physiology at the University of Breslau in Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1839 and the world’s first official physiology laboratory in 1842.
Figure 2. Jan Evangelista Purkyně (1787–1869).
Harvey Williams Cushing (1869–1939) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, graduated from Yale University, and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1895. He was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and developed many of the basic surgical techniques for operating on the brain. His name is associated with Cushing’s disease, an endocrinological syndrome caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland, which he termed polyglandular syndrome. Cushing authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Life of Sir William Osler in 1925.
Henry Charlton Bastian (1837–1915) graduated in 1861 at the University College, London, where he worked most of his life. He was one of the first neurologists appointed to the National Hospital, Queen Square, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1868. In 1869, five years before Wernicke’s book on aphasia with his well-known aphasia model with centers for auditory and motor images of words, he published a similar model of language in the brain in his paper, “On the Various Forms of Loss of Speech in Cerebral Disease.”
Scottish ophthalmologist and surgeon Douglas Argyll Robertson (1837–1909) described in 1869 a specific symptom of neurosyphilis: small pupils that did not constrict in response to stimulation with light but constricted normally during accommodation and convergence. This condition subsequently was called Argyll Robertson pupil.
Johan Friedrich Horner (1831–1886) was a Swiss ophthalmologist who, in 1869, described what subsequently would be named Horner’s syndrome: It is characterized by miosis (a constricted pupil), partial ptosis (a weak, droopy eyelid), and apparent anhidrosis (decreased sweating), with or without enophthalmos (inset eyeball).
The notion of neurasthenia was introduced in 1869, first by an American alienist from Michigan—Edwin H. Van Deusen (1828–1909), of the Kalamazoo asylum (Observation on a Form of Nervous Prostration (Neurasthenia) Culminating in Insanity)—followed a few months later by New York neurologist George Beard (1839–1883; Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion). Van Deusen associated the condition with farm wives made sick by isolation and a lack of engaging activity, whereas Beard connected the condition to busy society women and overworked businessmen.
1819
William Thomas Green Morton (1819–1869), a dentist born in Charlton City, demonstrated the effects of ether at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846, while surgeon John Collins Warren operated in front of a stunned audience.
A German professor of physiology, first in Dorpat and then in Leipzig, Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776–1847) produced his most important contribution to neuroscience, Vom Bau und Leben des Gehirns und Rückenmarks (On the Anatomy and Physiology of the Brain and Spinal Cord) in three volumes between 1819 and 1825.
1769 and before
Johann August Philipp Gesner (1738–1801) published his Sammlung von Beobachtungen aus der Arzneygelahrtheit und Natur (Collection of Observations in Medicine and Nature; 5 vols.) in 1769. It contained the first review of patients with aphasia or “language amnesia,” as Gesner would prefer to call it. He described various patients with specific, isolated language deficits.
German professor of medicine and chemistry Johann Thomas Hensing (1683–1726) provided the first chemical examination of the brain and the discovery of phosphorus therein in his Cerebri examen chemicum (A Study of Brain Chemistry), published in 1719.
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) was a Dutch scientist who is now considered the first microbiologist. In 1719, he produced drawings showing a longitudinal and a cross-section of a nerve and arguing that they were not hollow. He examined nerves from the spinal marrow of cows and sheep with the aid of the microscope.
Jacob Benignus Winslow (1669–1760) was a Danish-born French anatomist. His main work was Exposition anatomique de la structure du corps humain (Anatomical Exposition on the Structure of the Human Body), published in 1732. The omental foramen, which he first described, is still known under the alternative name of Winslow’s foramen, and he is credited with first documenting the existence of the foramen spinosum.
Discours de Monsieur Stenon sur l’anatomie de cerveau (Discourse of Mr. Steno on the Anatomy of the Brain) is the title of Niels Stensen’s (also known as Steno; 1638–1686) lecture to an assembly of scholars in Paris in 1665 that was published (and quickly translated as Lecture on the Anatomy of the Brain) in 1669. In it, Stensen argued, among other things, that Willis’s and Descartes’s speculations were useless.
Hieronymus Fabricius or Girolamo Fabrizio—known also by his full Latin name, Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1537–1619)—was a pioneering anatomist and surgeon known in medical science as the “father of embryology.” He worked at the University of Padua. By dissecting animals, Fabricius investigated, among other things, the peculiarities of the eye, the ear, and the larynx. In his Tabulae Pictae (Drawings), first published in 1600, he described the cerebral fissure separating the temporal lobe from the frontal lobe.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Wayne Lazar for his helpful comments and corrections.