Historical postmortem studies on catatonia: Close reading and analysis of Kahlbaum's cases and scientific texts between 1800 and 1900.

In the 19th century, postmortem brain examination played a central role in the search for the neurobiological origin of psychiatric and neurological disorders. During that time, psychiatrists, neurologists, and neuropathologists examined autopsied brains from catatonic patients and postulated that catatonia is an organic brain disease. In line with this development, human postmortem studies of the 19th century became increasingly important in the conception of catatonia and might be seen as precursors of modern neuroscience. In this report, we closely examined autopsy reports of eleven catatonia patients of Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum. Further, we performed a close reading and analysis of previously (systematically) identified historical German and English texts between 1800 and 1900 for autopsy reports of catatonia patients. Two main findings emerged: (i) Kahlbaum's most important finding in catatonia patients was the opacity of the arachnoid; (ii) historical human postmortem studies of catatonia patients postulated a number of neuroanatomical abnormalities such as cerebral enlargement or atrophy, anemia, inflammation, suppuration, serous effusion, or dropsy as well as alterations of brain blood vessels such as rupture, distension or ossification in the pathogenesis of catatonia. However, the exact localization has often been missing or inaccurate, probably due to the lack of standardized subdivision/nomenclature of the respective brain areas. Nevertheless, Kahlbaum's 11 autopsy reports and the identified neuropathological studies between 1800 and 1900 made important discoveries, which still have the potential to inform and bolster modern neuroscientific research in catatonia.

Modeling mothering: the development of an experimental system in neurobiology.

This article explores the development of a rat model of mother-infant relationships from its origins in the psychosomatic investigations of the mid-1960s to its elaboration into a theoretical system in neurobiology. I reconstruct the research trajectory of a group of neurobiologists in the United States, with a focus on the experimental practices they adopted while building this animal model. Providing a microhistory of this decade-long undertaking, I show that what drove the development of the model in practice was a serendipitous finding about infants' response to maternal separation. Detected inadvertently, the pup's separation response acquired an epistemic significance of its own and reoriented the experimental system towards unanticipated paths. To explain this intriguing phenomenon, the neurobiologists kept on refining their material manipulations and stabilizing their experimental outcomes. They thus established a series of causal relationships that connected dysregulations of the infant's physiological systems to disruptions in maternal care. As important as this interactive stabilization of technique and objects in the laboratory was how the researchers theorized the network of relationships derived from this technically constituted objectivity. Highlighting the practice-driven aspects of model-building, I demonstrate that what facilitated this theoretical process was an integrated design of complementary experiments. The outcome of each separate experiment of the research program came to bear upon the outcomes of other experiments, informing the development of future manipulations. It was this strategically driven integration process that allowed the experimenters to build expanding networks of causal relationships and consolidate them into a neurobiological theory.

The White Paper: Wilder Penfield, the Stream of Consciousness, and the Physiology of Mind.

Wilder Penfield is justly famous for his contributions to our understanding of epilepsy and of the structure-function relationship of the brain. His theory on the relationship of the brain and mind is less well known. Based on the effects of the electrical stimulation of the cortex in conscious patients, Penfield believed that consciousness and mind are functions of what he referred to as the centrencephalic integrating system. This functional system comprised bidirectional pathways between the upper brainstem, the thalami, and the cerebral cortex of both hemispheres, and was the physical substrate from which memory, perception, initiative, will, and judgment arose. It was the source of the stream of consciousness and the physical basis of mind. This paper reviews how Penfield arrived at this conception of the mind-brain relationship. Although Penfield ultimately felt that he had failed in his attempt to unify brain and mind, his work shed new light on the relationship of memory to the mesial temporal structures and to the temporal cortex; and his association of consciousness and the brainstem preceded the conceptualization of the reticular activating system by a generation. In these, as in so many aspects of neurobiology, Penfield was prescient.

[The psychopathology of the Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard School and its relevance for present-day psychiatry]. / Die Psychopathologie der Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard Schule und ihre Bedeutung für die aktuelle Psychiatrie.

Historically, the Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard School represents a countermovement to psychopathology as described by Karl Jaspers and Kurt Schneider. The School aimed to interlink psychopathological and neurobiological aspects. Starting from the model of different functional neuronal systems, each of which can be disturbed in the sense of a hypofunction, hyperfunction, or parafunction, it developed a comprehensive phenomenology of psychopathological symptoms and syndromes that finally culminated in Karl Leonhard's course descriptions. This school of thought can provide important impulses even today. Thus, on the one hand, the neurobiological models can serve as the basis for additional research projects and on the other hand, the psychopathological descriptions of disorders can perhaps also be interpreted in the sense of typological constructs that can contribute to pragmatic clinical decisionmaking.

Martin Raff.

Interview with Martin Raff, Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology and Affiliated Member of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London, by Jordan Raff, group leader at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford.

La anatomopatología alemana en el centro de la psiquiatría argentina. Una aproximación a los estudios clínicos en el Hospicio de las Mercedes (1900-1910) / German anatomical pathology in the center of argentine psychiatry: clinical studies at the Mercedes Hospital

En este trabajo nos ocupamos del desarrollo de la anatomopatología en el campo psiquiátrico en Buenos Aires, Argentina, principalmente en el Hospicio de las Mercedes a principios del 1900. Por medio del doctor Domingo Cabred, el gobierno argentino contrató al médico alemán Cristofredo Jacob a través del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, para que se hiciera cargo del Laboratorio de Clínica Psiquiátrica y Neurológica del Hospicio de las Mercedes (1889-1904). Para facilitar su trabajo, se construyó un laboratorio que era la réplica exacta del laboratorio de anatomía patológica en el que Jacob trabajaba en Alemania. Su labor fue fundamental, dado que cimentó la escuela neurobiológica argentina, campo en el que dejó importantes discípulos (Stagnaro, 2006). A partir de este contexto, investigaremos en este artículo parte del trabajo desarrollado en dicho laboratorio. Nos centraremos en los registros de una población de pacientes que fallecieron y fueron autopsiados en el hospicio. Examinaremos cuáles fueron los diagnósticos y analizaremos algunos vínculos entre la clínica de investigación y la teoría de la época referida a la anatomía patológica. Demostraremos que las prácticas del laboratorio - no sólo la autopsia, sino también los análisis de sangre - eran tecnologías críticas para sostener el marco diagnóstico higiénico. Las autopsias construyeron la conexión causal entre los cambios del cuerpo anatomoclínico y la psicopatología; y así, establecía la disciplina psiquiátrica como una rama legitima de la medicina, que generaba explicaciones científicas para la problemática social de la inmigración en el cambio de siglo en Argentina (AU)

In this article, we explore the development of pathological anatomy in the psychiatric field in Buenos Aires, Argentina, particularly in the Mercedes hospital beginning around 1900. The Argentine government, by means of Dr. Domingo Cabred, contracted German physician Christofried Jakob, through the Ministry of Foreign Relations, to take charge of the Laboratory of Clinical Psychiatry and Neurology at the Mercedes Hospital (1889-1904). To facilitate this work, a laboratory was constructed that was an exact replica of the laboratory of pathological anatomy developed in Germany. This work was critical to cementing the neurobiological school in Argentina and produced important followers of the biological approach to psychiatry. In this article, we investigate a part of the work that developed in this laboratory. Specifically, we focus on the registry of a population of patients who died and were subsequently autopsied in the hospital. We examine the diagnoses that were used to characterize this population and analyze the relationship between laboratory practice and the theory of anatomical pathology during this period. We show that laboratory practices - not just autopsy but also blood tests - were critical technologies to sustain a hygienic diagnostic framework in the hospital. Autopsies demonstrated the causal connection between changes in the anatomical-clinical body and psychopathology and thus, established the psychiatric field as a legitimate branch of medicine that produced scientific explanations for the social problematic of immigration at the turn of the century in Argentina (AU)

The Vogt family: Creators of diverse paths for women in biological research.

The life and careers of Cecile, Marthe and Marguerite Vogt are chronicled in this article during an era where women were not readily accepted in the upper echelons of academia. By exploring important questions, these women made major contributions to the broad base of scientific knowledge which impacted the fields of neurobiology in both the central and peripheral nervous systems, infectious disease, and oncogenesis. As a result, each was considered the elite of her respective field and achieved an enduring legacy.