Régis Olry

Medieval neuroanatomy: The text of Mondino Dei Luzzi and the plates of guido da Vigevano*

The Italian anatomists Mondino dei Luzzi (c. 1275-1326) and Guido da Vigevano (c. 1280-1349) must be regarded as pivotal figures in the history of medieval anatomy. Mondinos book (written in 1316 and published in 1478) was the first treatise of anatomy based on the dissection of human cadavers, whereas the plates of Vigevanos manuscript (1345) marked the beginning of a new trend which became increasingly widespread during the following centuries: the use of anatomical illustration in textbooks. Though their neuroanatomical descriptions are rather simple and somewhat difficult to correlate with current descriptions, analysis of these works sheds new light on the knowledge of brain and spinal cord anatomy in the Middle Ages (Olry, 1996). Vigevanos contribution to neuroanatomy, however, appears more important than that of Mondino dei Luzzi, probably because his anatomical illustrations often compelled the draftsman to break free from Galens dominating influence.

Anatomical eponyms, part 1: to look on the bright side.

The use of eponyms in medical sciences generally, and in anatomy specifically, remains controversial. In principle, this discussion should have been concluded as far back as 1895 (publication of the first Nomina anatomica): all eponyms should have been removed from the anatomical vocabulary then. In practice, what was believed to be a mere formality proved much more difficult to apply. Most eponyms remain in current use; moreover, their number goes on increasing. Assuming that theres no smoke without fire, we wondered why it seems impossible to get rid of a specific kind of term. The aim of this article and its successor is to weigh up the pros and cons. Clin. Anat. 27:1142–1144, 2014.

“Matthew Effect” in Neurosciences

Some years ago, we devoted a column to possessive/nonpossessive eponyms in neuroscience (Haines & Olry, 2003). The world of eponyms, of course, provides an inexhaustible supply of linguistic material for historians to scrutinize (Anonymous, 1986; Cooper, 1983; Burchell, 1985; Endtz, 1989; Dervaud, 1990; Olry, 1995). Let’s give two typical examples. Firstly, Ganser’s commissure, described in 1882 by Dresden neuropsychiatrist Sigbert Joseph Maria Ganser (1882). This commissure actually was discovered by Franz Schnopfhagen five years earlier (Schnopfhagen, 1877), and “par suite d’une confusion regrettable” (“by an unfortunate mistake”; Dejerine, 1901) L. O. Darkschewitsch and G. I. Pribytkov called it Forel’s commissure in 1891. Secondly, Bronislaw Onuf-Onufrowicz (1899) coined the term “Nucleus X” to refer to a parasympathetic subpopulation of sacral spinal cord neurons at the very end of the nineteenth century. His name was kept in anatomical literature but only in the form of “Onuf’s nucleus X” (Paturet, 1964). In the present column, we would like to explore another facet of eponyms: their involvement in the so-called “Matthew effect.” Robert King Merton (1910–2003), an American sociologist and Giddings Professor at Columbia University, coined the term “Matthew effect” to refer to the act of a priori ascribing an important scientific discovery to the head of the laboratory, even when the real discoverer had been one of his/her students (Merton, 1973; for review, see Rigney, 2010). In other words, history is more inclined to memorize the names of generals than those of lesser soldiers. The Matthew effect has its roots in the Gospel of Matthew, probably written in Syria in the late first century AD: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away” (Matthew 25:29; American Standard Version). One of the most famous examples of the Matthew effect, and one that became a media event, occurred in 1974, when British radio astronomer Anthony Hewish (b. 1924) won the Nobel Prize for Physics (together with Martin Ryle) for the discovery of pulsars. In reality, the first person to notice the stellar radio source was not him but his student Jocelyn Bell (b. 1943) (Wade, 1975; Broad & Wade, 1987; Greenstein, 1987). What about the Matthew effect in neurosciences? Let us look at two well-known eponyms (Gasser’s ganglion and Lasègue’s sign) and two less classical ones (Schacher’s ganglion and Davidoff-Schechter’s artery).

Renfield's Syndrome: A Psychiatric Illness Drawn from Bram Stoker's Dracula

The myth of vampirism is in the best of health, witness the many films (Karg, Spaite, & Sutherland, 2009; Ross, 1990), studies (Barber, 1988; Finne, 2010; Gaston, 2009; Ponnau, 1997; Pozzuoli, 2010...

Kanashibari (金縛り): A Ghost’s Business

On July 1, 1976, the German student Anneliese Michel was found dead in her parents’ house, in Klingenberg-am-Main, Bavaria. She was only 24 years old and the real nature of the disease from which she had been suffering during the last eight years of her life was—and continues to be—much written about: Some people say she had been struck down by a neurologic (epilepsy: generalized or uncinate) and/or psychiatric (psychosis) disorder (Goodman, 2005; Wolff, 2006; Wegner, 2009; Duffey, 2011), while others believe she had actually been possessed by the devil (Bullinger, 1983; Siegmund, 1985; Buttner, 1986; Fortea & LeBlanc, 2010). Such a differential diagnosis is of course not a matter for us (!), but the very first scary events Anneliese experienced in mid-September 1968 perfectly illustrate the topic of this column:

Anatomical eponyms, Part 2: The other side of the coin.

Over a century after they were removed, at least officially, from anatomical terminology, eponyms remain an obviously controversial topic. In the first part of this paper we acted as their defense counsel, aiming to demonstrate that the 1895 first edition of the Nomina Anatomica and subsequently the Federative Committee on Anatomical Terminology (FCAT) probably put the cart before the horse. However, their authors advanced arguments supporting their decision, and it is now time to develop these arguments. Let us now become the public prosecutor of eponyms. Clin. Anat. 27:1145–1148, 2014.

Between André Du Laurens' horse tail and William Cadogan's pony tail.

The Genevan physician Théodore Colladon, the Dresden bibliographer Ludwig Choulant, and the Berlin historian of medicine Julius Leopold Pagel had at least one thing in common: All three were harsh critics of André Du Laurens’ Historia anatomica humani corporis. In the early-seventeenth century, Théodore Colladon (d. ca. 1636), a student of Girolamo Fabrici (ca. 1533–1619), simply considered it as being not worth much (Colladon, 1615, Vol. 1, p. 1). In his mid-1800s famous study on anatomical iconography, Ludwig Choulant (1791–1861) wrote that its illustrations were “ohne besonderen anatomischen oder künstlerischen Werth” [“without special anatomical or artistic value”] (Choulant, 1852, p. 75). In the late nineteenth century, Julius Leopold Pagel (1851–1912) considered it as a “Gewebe von Aberglauben, halbverdauten, unrecht verstandenen und schief vorgetragenen Grundsätzen, ohne dass dabei die grossen Entdeckungen seiner Vorgänger und Zeitverwandten gehörig benutz worden wären” [“tissue of superstition, indigestible, misunderstood and wrongly presented principles, without any reference to the great discoveries made by his predecessors and contemporaries”] (Pagel, cited in Wolf-Heidegger & Cetto, 1967, p. 231). Objection your honor! Every day, thousands of anatomists, neurologists, neuroradiologists, and neurosurgeons around the world pay homage—wittingly or not—to the memory of André Du Laurens, whose 1600 Historia anatomica included the roots of the term “cauda equine,” and an explicit engraved plate accounting for this metaphor (Figure 1). Let’s recall that the term “cauda equina” (meaning horse’s tail) refers to “the bundle of lumbar, sacral and coccygeal roots surrounding the filum terminale, caudal to the cord” (Nieuwenhuys, Voogd, & van Huijzen, 2008, p. 177), and that it is also used in comparative anatomy (Leyh, 1871, p. 525). Who was André Du Laurens and what about the book in question? André Du Laurens (often wrongly spelled Dulaurens), the son of a physician, was born at Arles, South of France, in 1558. He studied medicine at the University of Montpellier from which he received his MD in 1583. In 1586, he succeeded Laurent Joubert (1529–1583) as Professor of Medicine, in 1600 joined the court of the King of France, three years later was appointed chancellor of the Montpellier University, and in 1606 replaced Roch Baillif de la Rivière

NEUROwords 20 Nomenclature of Persistent Carotid Vertebrobasilar Anastomoses

In the course of their development, the carotid and vertebrobasilar arterial systems are temporarily anastomosed with each other by small arteries which usually disappear from the stage 4 of development (12–14 mm embryos) (Padget, 1948). These vessels (hypoglossal, proatlantal, trigeminal, otic, and cervical intersegmental arteries) may persist in adult. They often coexist with other vascular abnormalities, and may sometimes be responsible for various neurological disorders (see Bracard, 1983, for review). The hypoglossal artery arises from the posterior aspect of the internal carotid artery, usually at the level of the C1-C2 intervertebral space. It passes through the hypoglossal canal and joins the basilar artery (Bracard, 1983, pp. 292–310). It may give rise to the anterior spinal and anterior inferior cerebellar arteries (Resche, 1979; Resche et al., 1980). The first anatomical description of the hypoglossal artery was made in 1889 by Batujeff (who regarded it as a basilar artery arising from the internal carotid artery: Testut, 1905), and the first angiographical observation in 1953 by Dalle Ore and Galan (Resche, 1979). The term hypoglossal artery was coined in 1922 by Oertel (Bracard, 1983), pointing out the fact that this artery, whatever its course might be, always runs through the hypoglossal canal of occipital bone. Buntaro Adachi, the ‘‘pivotal figure of vascular anatomy’’ (Olry & Lellouch, 2003) and his Tokyo colleague Hirakô described this artery in 1928, but seemed not to know about the term coined six years earlier. The proatlantal artery arises from the posterior aspect of the cervical part of the internal carotid artery, at the level of the C2-C3 intervertebral space. It inclines then backwards, passes over the lateral mass of the atlas (it should therefore have been called supra-atlantal artery), enters the cranial cavity by the foramen magnum, and joins the origin of the basilar artery (Bracard, 1983, pp. 311–320). It often gives rise to the occipital artery (Samra et al., 1969; Anderson & Sondheimer, 1976; Pinstein & Gerald, 1976; Legre et al., 1980; Obayashi & Furuse, 1980). The first anatomical description of a proatlantal artery was made by Gottschau in 1885. In 1960, on an angiography Luccarelli and de Ferrari could find a variant of proatlantal artery, that arose from the external carotid artery. This led Lie to acknowledge two types of proatlantal arteries: those arising from the internal carotid artery (which he called intersegmental proatlantal artery) and those arising from the external carotid artery (which he called primitive proatlantal artery) (Lie, 1968).

Ondine’s curse: With Jean Giraudoux’s finishing touches

Monday February 12, 1883, Vendramin-Calergi Palace, Venice: In an apartment rented by Duke della Grazia, the fourth of that line, a 69-year-old man reads a book while his friend, the German painter of Russian origin Paul von Joukowsky (1813–1883), sketches a pencil drawing of him. Late that evening, the old man tells his wife Cosima (née von Bülow): “I love them, these creatures of the depths.” And he asks: “And you, aren’t you one of these creatures?” (Mistler, 1962, p. 230). The creatures (ondines) and the book (Undine) in question led two Californian physicians to coin a new term in neurological nomenclature over 50 years ago. As for the old man, he was famed composer Richard Wagner (see Fig. 1), and he would die the next day.

“Magic Mirror in my Hand, Who is the Fairest in the Land … and, Incidentally, Are You Transparent or Shining?”

May brothers Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859) forgive us for this implied reference to one of their most celebrated fairy tales! But let’s leave the Evil Queen and her Magic Mirror aside and concentrate on the septum pellucidum that was sometimes compared with—hence our title—a transparent or a shining mirror. To start with the term septum, broadly speaking it consists of two parts. The ventral part, known as the septum verum (true or real septum), is situated within the paraterminal gyrus and contains two cell masses: the lateral septal nucleus and the medial septal complex (Nieuwenhuys, Voogd, & van Juijzen, 2008, p. 363). The dorsal part, or septum pellucidum, is a “bilateral laminae of fibres, sparse grey matter and neuroglia” (Standring, 2008, p. 352), interposed between the anterior part of the lateral ventricles (medially), the basal surface of the corpus callosum (rostrally), and the rostral convexity of the fornix (caudally). The Latin word septum, or more exactly saeptum (Quicherat, 1962, p. 254), does not present any etymological ambiguity: It means “partition” or “dividing wall” (between both lateral ventricles in this case) and also applies to a great number of other anatomical structures (33 different entries in the index of the current edition of the Gray’s Anatomy: Standring, 2008, p. 1534; no less than 62 entries in Terra, 1913, pp. 491–494). According to the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680), Galen had used an equivalent term: the cerebral diaphragm (Galen as cited in Bartholin, 1677, p. 492). On the other hand, the etymology of the adjective pellucidum or perlucidum seems a little more questionable: Per may actually mean either “very” or “through,” and lucidus either “to shine” or “to be transparent” (Joubert, 1738, pp. 698, 1237, 1240; Quicherat, 1962, pp. 833, 1460, 1463; Gaffiot, 1989, pp. 412, 337). Now something transparent is a medium through which light can travel, whereas something shining emits or reflects light. It seems therefore that a structure, whatever its physical properties may be, cannot be both transparent and shining. French anatomist and medical examiner François Chaussier (1746–1828), pointing out that this septum is “presque entièrement opaque” [almost completely opaque] (Chaussier, 1807, p. 53), proposed the topographical adjective median rather than pellucid. Other