Neurognostics Questions The Foundation of the Society of German Neurologists in 1907 and the First Two Presidents

Charcot. Constructing Neurology Authors: CG Goetz, M Bonduelle and T Gelfand, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, xx + 392 pp.

The Wever Hospital, Heerlen, The Netherlands. The Babinski Sign: A Centenary Author: J. van Gijn, MD, FRCPE, Utrecht, University Press, 1996. 176 pp., ISBN 90–9008908‐X $ 49,50     

Science and fate: Lina Stern (1878-1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist

Lina Stern (1878-1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist, was born in Russia. She studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where, after graduating, she conducted original research in physiology and biochemistry. In 1918, Stern was the first woman to be awarded a professional title at the University of Geneva and headed the department of Physiological Chemistry. She is deservedly considered to be one of the first scientists to entertain the concept of a blood-brain barrier. In 1929, Stern founded the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, of which she was director until 1948, when it was discontinued. Under her leadership, multidisciplinary groups of colleagues worked on the problems of the blood-brain and tissue-brain barriers and homeostasis of the brain. In 1939, Stern was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and became its first female member ever. Most scientists manage to conduct their research by adjusting to the political and social situations surrounding them. Lina Stern did not follow this path. This small woman of complete devotion to science took the drastic decisions that altered her life. Though destiny was not kind to her, Lina Stern did not compromise. Despite a threat of execution, prolonged imprisonment, and exile she was never broken as a scientist and always maintained her dignity.     

The nuclear nation and the German question: an American reactor in West Berlin

This essay analyses the relationship between nuclear technology and ideas about the nation in the late 1950s by looking at the US–West German bilateral agreement and at American proposals to develop reactors in West Berlin, both of which emerged from Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace programme. American efforts to maintain tight control over the German nuclear sphere contradicted the claim that reactors were solely instruments of peace. At the same time, plans to build a reactor in West Berlin underscored that city's status as an occupied city with an uncertain future and with ill-defined relationships to East and West Germany.     

Telling Contested Stories: J. G. A. Pocock and Paul Ricoeur

This paper traces a mutually reinforcing set of arguments about the practice of history in the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Paul Ricoeur that responds to challenges posed to the autonomy of selves and their communities raised by both thinkers. It begins with their respective views on language, texts and actions, moves to the construction of narrative and historiography, and concludes with their account of selves and the communities to which they belong. Corresponding to these three considerations are a set of conclusions drawn with different emphases: first, that both texts and acts are potentially open to indefinite and plural interpretations; second, that narrative and historiography are constitutively contested modes of critical discourse continually open to the construction of new meaning; and third, that the contested, capable, narrative self, and the community to which that mediated self belongs, exercises autonomy as an active, responsible, reflective citizen and/or critical historian. It concludes from this study that the limited openness of language, narrative and identity constitutes the promise and risk of history as a contested and affective representation.     

Johann Gaspar Spurzheim: The St. Paul of phrenology

ABSTRACT

Franz Joseph Gall’s wayward discipline Johann Gaspar Spurzheim greatly modified Gall’s original system and introduced it to the English-speaking world. Through an active program of itinerant lecturing, publishing and converting disciplines, Spurzheim made phrenology. He also developed a philosophy of following the laws of nature that was adopted and further promoted by his disciple, George Combe. Combe’s book The Constitution of Man (1828) became one of the best-selling works of its genre in the nineteenth century. Thus Spurzheim, never particularly original, exercised an enormous influence on nineteenth-century culture.