The brain under the knife: serial sectioning and the development of late nineteenth-century neuroanatomy

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Abstract

Major changes took place during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the ways that the brain tissue was maintained, manipulated and studied, and, consequently, in the ways that its structure, functions and pathologies were seen and represented in neurological literature. The paper exemplifies these changes by comparing German neuroanatomy in the 1860s and early 1870s (represented above all by Theodor Meynert) with the turn-of-the-century view of the brain (represented by Constantin von Monakow and others). It argues for the crucial importance of a method—serial sectioning—to the emergence of the new view of the brain. Serial sectioning in turn owes its existence to the new techniques in staining and sectioning that were introduced in the 1870s and 1880s. In particular, the paper highlights the role of a cutting device, the microtome, in enabling serial sectioning and in thereby contributing to the emergence of a new view of the brain.

Introduction

In the early 1870s, the Viennese neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert (1833–1892) was, as a postgraduate student of his put it, ‘the most distinguished person in Europe as regards psychiatry and brain anatomy’.1 Meynert’s research skills were praised, and his descriptions of cerebral pathways and the structure of the cortex were considered authoritative. By mid-1880s, however, Meynert was being heavily criticised and, by the 1890s, he was mainly used as a negative reference point. The leitmotiv of the criticism was the more or less outspoken charge that Meynert’s claims lack factual support and his observations cannot be replicated by less imaginative observers. Thus August Forel (1848–1931) remarked that Meynert’s ‘imagination made leaps which exceeded mine tens times over’,2 and Sigmund Freud (1956–1939) disparaged Meynert’s ‘far-reaching speculations on anatomical conditions’.3 Even Friedrich Jolly’s (1844–1904) obituary contained ambiguous references to Meynert’s ‘lively artistic imagination’, his ‘naïve artistic outlook’ and his ‘peculiar system’ so rich in ‘startling notions’.4

This violent counter-reaction against the Meynertian view of the brain has been put down to his controversial personality, to his somewhat uneasy position between university and asylum psychiatry and/or to his convoluted manner of expression.5 It might be added that the unification of Germany in 1871 decreased the relative weight of the Vienna Medical School and its anatomo-pathological emphasis in comparison to Berlin with its more heavily physiological research orientation. This paper offers a further explanation for Meynert’s brusque fall from grace: it focuses on the major changes that took place in dissecting and preparation techniques in the 1870s and 1880s, particularly on the emergence of serial sectioning, and argues that this silent revolution needs to be taken into account if one wants to understand, first, the demise of the Meynertian view of the brain and, second, the wider neurological reorientation that took place around the turn of the century. This reorientation is characterised above all by severe erosion of localisationist explanations.6

I shall start by looking at Meynert’s view of the brain and his anatomical research techniques, move on to describe the emergence of serial sectioning in the mid-1870s (I shall focus on a relatively little studied instrument, the microtome), and lastly discuss the theoretical and disciplinary consequences of the introduction of the new method. There are two strands of historical research that are relevant to this enterprise: studies which discuss nineteenth-century serial sectioning and microtomy in contexts other than brain studies7 and studies which focus on neurological ideas—on Meynert’s views8 or on the questions of localism and/or holism9—in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. This paper complements them by discussing the role of serial sectioning in neurosciences and, more specifically, by assigning it a causal role in the anti-Meynertian and anti-localisationist reactions. Instead of relating neurological ideas to the broader social and political context, I shall ask what happened in the restricted but fundamentally important context of the neurological laboratory.

Section snippets

The brain according to Meynert

I would hesitate to say that Theodor Meynert is representative of his era in the sense of being typical. However, his work does illustrate the opportunities that were open to an ambitious and skilful student of the brain in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Although Meynert remained active until the late 1880s, the main tenets of both his method and his conception of the brain were securely in place by the mid-1870s.

Meynert spent his professional life in Vienna, where he held a chair of

Cutting up the brain

In the mid-1870s, the two standard methods in the anatomical study of the human brain were defibering and freehand sectioning. By the mid-1880s, the two had been largely surpassed by serial sectioning, by the study of secondary degenerations

Serial sectioning in Faseranatomie

In less than a generation, serial sectioning changed the face of Meynert’s two main fields of interest—the anatomy of cerebral pathways (Faseranatomi) and the morphological study of the cortex—and it also left its mark on pathological anatomy.

The study of cerebral pathways was the first and most obvious beneficiary of the new opportunities offered by serial sectioning. Meynert was the foremost authority in this field, and it is therefore no wonder that his view of cerebral pathways came under

Serial sectioning in the histological study of the cortex

At the turn of the century, the cellular structure and arrangement of the cortex became the subject of an ambitious new research programme, cytoarchitectonics. The pioneers of the programme were Alfred W. Campbell (1868–1937) in Britain and Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918) and, somewhat later, Oskar Vogt (1870–1959) and his wife Cécile Vogt (1875–1962) in Germany.

A look at Brodmann’s publications shows that cytoarchitectonics relied heavily on serial sectioning. According to Brodmann, ‘any

Serial sectioning in neuropathology: the case of aphasia

A shift of emphasis is also apparent in the field of pathological anatomy around the turn of the century, and this shift is partly due to new research techniques such as serial sectioning. The following examples deal with aphasia, the most thoroughly studied brain-based pathology in the late nineteenth century.

The ‘classical’ theory of aphasia was based on the correlation between various clinical manifestations on the one hand and the presence of localisable lesions on the other hand. The two

Disciplinary consequences

New microtechniques affected the contents of histological and neurological theories but they also modified the disciplinary landscape. I shall lastly discuss some of these disciplinary consequences.

First, there were changes in the relationship of the various specialties concerned with the study of the brain. Armed with the new microtechniques, microscopical anatomy largely supplanted macroscopical anatomy, while neurophysiologists increasingly relied on anatomists to supply their experimental

Concluding remarks

Serial sectioning was effectively introduced to brain anatomy after the mid-1870s when it first became possible to section entire human brains. It rapidly changed the face of Meynert’s three major fields of interest: anatomical study of cerebral pathways and centres, histological study of the cortex and pathological anatomy of brain diseases. The demise of Meynert’s conception of the brain is thus readily understandable. More generally, serial sectioning undermined the strictly localist view of

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