Brain, Vol. 126, No. 5, 1241-1242,
May 2003
© 2003 Guarantors of Brain
doi: 10.1093/brain/awg094
Book Review |
NEUROLOGICAL EPONYMS
Royal College of Physicians, London, UK
NEUROLOGICAL EPONYMS
Edited by P. J. Koehler, George W. Bruyn and John M. S. Pearce
2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Price £39.50. pp. 400. ISBN 0-19-513366-8.
Over the years neurological eponyms have excited reactions varying from outright rejection to wholehearted embrace. The former was typical of Gowers and F. M. R. Walshe who in the first edition of his Diseases of the Nervous System wrote ‘... there is a growing tendency in neurological writings to employ a complex and redundant terminology that is fast rendering them unintelligible to all but professed neurologists, and to multiply the enumeration and description of those eponymous signs and syndromes by means of which enterprising clinicians stake out their claims, as it were, upon the human body’. The latter reaction is exemplified by Kinnier Wilson who reproved Derek Denny-Brown when a resident (as Denny-Brown himself told me, and is recounted in this delightful book) for referring to hepato-lenticular degeneration instead of Kinnier Wilson’s disease.
Recently, there has been something of a revival of the use of eponyms, not least, as the editors of Neurological Eponyms suggest, as a convenient shorthand. Even Walshe used the adjective ‘parkinsonism’. I confess to being less persuaded by the editors’ other proposal, that eponyms went out of fashion because physicians wished their subject to seem more like the ‘"real" sciences such as mathematics and physics’, and now that medicine has become more scientific, they are more comfortable about using eponyms again. Be that as it may, the book that has resulted from a decision to write about the men (for there are as yet no women) who are eponymously remembered has admirably fulfilled the editors’ aim of producing a book which is both educational and entertaining.
The book is in five parts: structures and processes, symptoms and signs, reflexes and other tests, syndromes, and diseases and defects. Each entry begins with a short account of the life and education of the individual, followed by his eponymous contribution set in the context of his overall output and the intellectual context of its time. There follows an indication of its present relevance.
A particularly attractive feature of the book is the quotations from the original papers, often in the original language as well as in English. These will be invaluable to those who wish to know precisely what was originally said. The illustrations too are frequently taken from the definitive publication. A striking example is Sir Charles Bell’s drawing of the trigeminal and facial nerves. As Antoine Keyser and John Pearce point out, Bell as a boy had been taught by David Allan, a major figure in the eighteenth century school of Scottish painters. Bell later recalled that Allan would greet him with ‘Ha! Brother Brush, let’s see what you have been doing!’; surely a mark of approbation. A charming example from another artistically talented writer is the pair of illustrations from Moro’s paper describing his reflex, one showing a human infant in the first stage of the reflex, the other a baby monkey clasping its mother as in the second.
A number of themes emerge. One is the diversity of early educational background of the anatomists, physiologists, pathologists, physicians and surgeons who are memorialized. Some were taught at home (like Korsakoff) and others (like Wernike) in the formal tradition of schooling. Another theme is the breadth and diversity of the medical training: Brodmann, for example, studied in Munich, Würzburg, Berlin and Freiburg-im-Breisgau; Schwann in Bonn, Würzburg and Berlin; and Adie, an Australian, in Edinburgh, Berlin, Munich, Vienna and Paris. This freedom of interchange between the universities of Europe, the UK and the US which had played such an important role in advancing our understanding of the nervous system since Vesalius in the mid-sixteenth century spent five years in Padua after Paris and Venice was gravely disrupted when Hitler came to power in the 1930s. But the intellectual life of other parts of the old world and the new was enriched by the consequent diaspora, as Jean Meadawar and David Pyke record in their recent book Hitler’s Gift: Scientists Who Fled Nazi Germany.
Another theme is the close and mutually advantageous links that existed a century ago between psychiatry, neuroanatomy and neuropathology, reflected for example in the work of Alzheimer, Korsakoff and Wernike, and the contributions from the laboratories of Edinger and Kraepelin. Amongst those who worked in the latter, besides Alzheimer, were Brodmann, von Economo, Jakob, Nissl and Spielmeyer. The mental and physical neurosciences grew apart in the mid-twentieth century to the detriment of both. But as the contents of Brain attest, their reconvergence, facilitated by the development of powerful new techniques of exploring brain structure and function in vivo is leading to real progress in understanding how the brain functions in health and disease.
Neurological Eponyms rightly gives pride of place to neurological contributions. But other achievements are not neglected. Amongst the more remarkable are those of Theodore Schwann whose contributions in the 1830s included the demonstration that alcoholic fermentation is associated with living organisms, the organic nature of yeast, the discovery of pepsin in gastric juice and (using physical–mathematical methods) that the tension of a contracting muscle varies with its length.
By any count, this book is a success and can be warmly recommended.
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