Editorial
In ‘The good is oft interred with their bones’ Trevor Hughes tells the story of how, despite the many scandals of body snatching and dissection, the acquisition of accurate anatomical knowledge was fundamental to the evolution of modern medicine. This is a tale punctuated by the Anatomy Act of 1832 that sought to discourage illicit supplies organized by the ‘Sack-em-up Men’—Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London—by regulating and assisting human anatomical dissection, and by the Human Tissue Act of 2004, reacting to practices in Bristol and Liverpool (UK) that offended the sensitivities of a public now informed and proactive with respect to ownership of tissue archived in hospitals, museums and (as religious relics) in churches (page 1167). Starting with Mondinus of Padua, and pausing briefly to consider the contributions of John Caius in Cambridge, Professor Hughes settles on Thomas Willis of Oxford as the founder of modern neurological anatomy and neuropathology. As Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy from 1660, Willis was required to lecture every Wednesday and Saturday, reading from Aristotle. There was a 10s fine for non-compliance but Willis steadfastly ignored these instructions and discussed instead clinical and experimental neurology and psychiatry. Willis replaced versions of Greek wisdom, largely unchallenged for nearly 12 centuries, with new theories on the senses, faculties and affections of the soul much influenced by his improved anatomy of the nervous system.But Thomas Willis and his cronies were not altogether clear of being labelled as resurrectionists. Willis's reputation was enhanced by the case of Anne Green, hanged for infanticide in December 1650 (although she may actually have concealed a still birth fathered by the son of the house where she worked as a maid), but found still to be breathing when prepared for dissection by William Petty at Buckley Hall. Despite efforts to extinguish life by stamping on her breast and stomach—activities that may presumably have assisted recovery by abdominal ventilation and external cardiac massage—Anne was resuscitated by Willis with help from Ralph Bathurst and Henry Clarke (of Trinity and Magdalen Colleges, respectively). A fictionalized account of this event is retold in A Sign at the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (1997). A popular rhyme of the times went:
Anne Green was a slippery queanAnd another ended with the couplet:In vain did the jury detect her:-
She cheated Jack Ketch, and then the vile wretch
Scap’d the knife of the learned dissector
... thus ‘tis more easy to recall the deadthan to restore a once-lost Maiden-head
In the printed edition of the February issue, we repeatedly misspelled the name of Nicholas Humphrey in our editorial, list of contents and legend to the book review. Furthermore, we acknowledge that comments relating to the review of ‘Seeing red’ by Daniel Dennett were taken out of context and misrepresented the author's intended analysis of that book. The printed version of Daniel Dennett's review contained an important typographical error, introduced at proof stage: at page 592 the text should read: ‘According to the 19th-century philosopher/logician Gottlob Frege, "An experience is impossible without an experient. The inner world presupposes the person whose inner world it is."’ We apologize to Nicholas Humphrey and to Daniel Dennett for these mistakes.
The present issue includes seven papers that focus on plasticity and repair in the brain and spinal cord. In his scientific commentary, John Priestley (page 895) explains how the work of Justin Smith and colleagues (page 915) and Clare Galtrey and others (page 926)—both associated with the research group of James Fawcett in the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair, and with Université Paris (France), GlaxoSmithKline (UK) and the School of Medicine UCLA (USA), respectively—offers the prospect of enhancing plasticity, through pharmacological manipulations with chondroitinase ABC and inosine, and shaping anatomical rearrangements in the context of traumatic brain and peripheral nerve injuries, so as to achieve improved hand function during the critical period during which sprouting undergoes pruning and connectivity is being refashioned. Michel Desmurget, Francois Bonnetblanc and Hughes Duffau (Bron and Montpellier, France) review the evidence for adaptations in function that distinguish acute and chronic ‘injuries’ of the brain, largely deriving their material from the study of gliomas (page 898). Armin Buss and colleagues from Aachen (Germany), Perth (Australia) and Liège (Belgium) characterize the range and distribution of growth limiting molecules that limit axon regeneration after spinal cord injury, the emphasis being on inhibitory properties of the astroglial domain rather than the Schwann cell rich compartment within the scar (page 940). Jian Chen and co-workers from the group of Melitta Schachner in Hamburg and Göttingen (Germany), New Jersey (USA) and Warsaw (Poland) report beneficial effects of increasing the expression of L1, using viral vectors, explained by a reduction in inhibitory molecules and scar formation, enhanced axonal reinnervation and resulting in an improved ability of experimental animals to step (page 954). Andrew Toft, Dugald Scott, Susan Barnett and John Riddell from Glasgow (UK) provide a detailed electrophysiological account of the extent to which improved function in the spinal cord, associated with olfactory ensheathing cell transplantation, depends more on preserved function within the existing circuitry than axonal regeneration across the lesion site (page 970). And Cindy Shin-Yi Lin and investigators from Sydney (Australia) and Gothenberg (Sweden) describe the surprising extent of trans-synaptic axonal injury, not attributable to comorbidity seen in peripheral nerve well distal to sites of spinal cord injury (page 985).
‘Nowhere in physiology does the cell-theory reveal its presence more frequently in the very framework of the argument than at the present time in the study of nervous reactions. The cell-theory at its inception depended for exemplification largely on merely morphological observations; just as these formed originally the almost exclusive texts for the Darwinian doctrine of evolution.’ Thus opens what is arguably the greatest work in neuroscience of the 20th century, firmly setting the analysis that is to follow in the context of work by Rudolph Virchow, Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Charles Darwin. Based on the Silliman lectures delivered at Yale College—the last of which was attended by only three people—the sheets of Sir Charles Sherrington's Integrative Action of the Nervous System printed in New Haven were first issued by Constable and Co., London, in October 1906, and, soon after, by Yale University Press and by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Sherrington was born in 1857. October 2006 and November 27, 2007 are, therefore, the centenary and sesquicentenary of the crowning scientific achievement and the birth of this diminutive, modest yet brilliant scientist, respectively. We are celebrating these dates with a series of occasional papers to be published over the next few months. Later will appear a personal reminiscence of Sherrington by his last surviving student—Dr William Gibson—who worked in Oxford from 1935 and remained in contact with Sir Charles until his death in 1952, aged 95. Dr Gibson was introduced to Sherrington by Wilder Penfield with whom he was then studying at the newly opened Montreal Neurological Institute. Our series will also include an assessment of Sherrington's influence on Penfield written by Dr William Feindel, former director of the Montreal Neurological Institute and an authority on Thomas Willis. In 1957, to mark the centenary of his birth, Penfield wrote an analysis of ‘Sir Charles Sherrington, Poet and Philosopher’ (Brain 1957: 80; 402–410). We are publishing a re-evaluation of that verse by John Fuller—poet, former professor of poetry at Oxford and fellow emeritus of Magdalen College (as was Sir Charles Sherrington)—and of his philosophy by Adam Zeman, neurologist and philosopher. To start this short series, the present issue contains an assessment of The Integrative Action of the Nervous System by Dr Robert Burke, formerly Chief of the Laboratory of Neural Control, National Institutes of Health, USA (page 887). Although ED Adrian considered The Integrative Action of the Nervous System not to be light reading, Dr Burke provides a simplified critique of the core chapters, based on Lectures I–VIII, in which Sherrington lays out his formulation of reflex activity in the spinal cord and descending parts of the motor system with its emphasis on reciprocal inhibition; the great synthesis that is Lecture IX; and the possibility that, in considering psychical events and perception, Sherrington may have stretched the authority of original experimental observations that otherwise permeate his magisterial synthesis. Bob Burke's introduction to The Integrative Action of the Nervous System and the biblio-biographical details he includes serve as a faithful and informed tribute, and will appeal both to experts and those coming newly to this great book.
The Integrative Action of the Nervous System is listed (item 397) as ‘a classic of neurology’ in the exhibition—‘Printing and the Mind of Man’ (1963)—illustrating the impact on human culture and history of the introduction by Johann Gutenberg of Mainz in c1455 of printing with moveable type. This was not the first major synthesis of function in the nervous system attempted by Sherrington. From 1890, he had increasingly taken over the volume of (Sir) Michael Foster's Textbook of Physiology dealing with the nervous system; and, in 1900, he contributed nearly 250 pages to EA (later, Sir Edward Sharpey Shaefer) Schäfer's Textbook of Physiology. Sir Charles Sherrington had a long association with Brain, serving on the editorial board from 1908 to 1951, and he published 10 papers in this journal between 1886 and 1931. In 1939, when his experimental work was largely all published, the Guarantors invited Derek Denny Brown to edit a collection of Selected Writings written during Sherrington's appointments in Cambridge (1884–87), London (1887–95), Liverpool (1895–1913) and Oxford (1913–35). Sir Charles's appreciation of this volume is expressed in a letter to the editor, Gordon Holmes (see Figure).
In 1887, the Neurological Society of London, founded in 1885, adopted Brain as its official journal and a triennial Hughlings Jackson lecture was later established by the Society at the suggestion of Dr WS Colman, the first being given in 1897 by Jackson himself. In 1907, the Neurological Society became part of the Royal Society of Medicine, the link with Brain lapsing thereafter. In 1932, a ginger group split from the Section of Neurology of the Royal Society of Medicine to form the Association of British Neurologists. They took on the Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, founded by SA Kinnier Wilson in 1920 and continued as the Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry under the editorship of EA Carmichael from 1938 and as the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry—the so-called ‘green journal’—from 1944. The Hughlings Jackson lecture survived these administrative rearrangements, being delivered by Edward Hitzig (1900), William Broadbent (1903), Victor Horsley (1906), William Gowers (1909), Henry Head (1920), Charles Dana (1927) and, in 1931, Charles Sherrington. In From the Archives, we review ‘Quantitative management of contraction in lowest level co-ordination’ based on the 8th Hughlings Jackson given on January 29, 1931 (Brain 1931: 54; 1–28).
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