The role of Herman Hoppe of Cincinnati in the initial clinical recognition of myasthenia gravis

One of the earliest papers describing a case of what came to be known as myasthenia gravis was written in 1892 in the German language by an American, Herman Hoppe, who at the time was an assistant in the Berlin polyclinic of the prominent German neurologist. Hermann Oppenheim. At Oppenheim's instigation, Hoppe published the pathology of a case that Oppenheim had diagnosed during life; he collected all the reported similar cases and tried to establish a symptom-complex, for which he was given credit in Oppenheim's great neurology textbook of 1894. Upon his return to Cincinnati, Ohio, Hoppe's European experience qualified him as a specialist in nervous and mental diseases. His private practice of "neuropsychiatry" was his main occupation, but he also volunteered to teach as Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases at the University of Cincinnati. In 1901 Oppenheim published the first monograph about what he called "Die Myasthenische Paralyse (Bulbarparalyse ohne anatomischen Befund)", summarizing 60 cases described in the medical literature up to that time. Hoppe, on the other hand, wrote on myasthenia gravis only once again, a review article in 1914 in a Cincinnati weekly, giving Oppenheim credit for the establishment of the disease as a clinical entity.     

Der Lexikograf Gerhard Wahrig – Systemgrenzen und Ressourcen: Zur Entstehung seines Projekts „Wörterbuch als Datenbank“

Systems, Boundaries and Resources: The Lexicographer Gerhard Wahrig (1923–1978) and the Genesis of his Project “Dictionary as Database”. Gerhard Wahrig’s private archive has recently been retrieved by the authors and their siblings. We undertake a first survey of the unpublished material and concentrate on those aspects of Wahrig’s bio-ergography which stand in relation to his life project “dictionary as database”, realised shortly before his death. We argue that this project was conceived in the 1950s, while Wahrig was writing and editing dictionaries and encyclopedias for the Bibliographisches Institut in Leipzig. Wahrig, who had been a wireless operator in WWII, was well informed about the development of computers in West Germany. He was influenced both by Ferdinand de Saussure and by the discussion on language and structure in the Soviet Union. When he crossed the German/German border in 1959, he experienced mechanisms of exclusion before he could establish himself in the West as a lexicographer. We argue that the transfer of symbolic and human capital was problematic due to the cultural differences between the two Germanies. In the 1970s, he became a professor of General and Applied Linguistics. The project of a “dictionary as database” was intended both as a basis for extensive empirical research on the semantic structure of natural languages and as a working tool for the average user of the German language. Due to his untimely death, he could not pursue his idea of exploring semantic networks.     

Hermann Oppenheim's observations about music in aphasia

Hermann Oppenheim was influential in many areas of neurology, but his ideas about music are relatively unknown. In 1888, he published a paper that outlined how the assessment of music skills in patients with aphasia could lead to a better understanding of aphasia and language. Oppenheim conducted the first comprehensive music assessment as part of a neurologic examination and presented the first case series of music in aphasia. His paper was widely cited and had significant influence over the next 30 years. Although largely unrecognized as such, Oppenheim was an important historical figure in the study of music and neurology.     

Questioning Whether Thomas Jefferson Was the “Father” of American Archaeology

In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787 [1954]), Thomas Jefferson described a systematic investigation he conducted of a Native American burial mound near his home at Monticello. Based upon this early excavation and Jefferson’s report of the contents of various layers he observed in the mound, authors of introductory archaeological textbooks frequently refer to Jefferson as the “father” of archaeology in the United States. While Jefferson’s methods anticipated modern archaeological techniques, this essay questions the extent to which he was a disinterested observer of what his dig uncovered. Because his conclusions were rooted less in understanding Native American cultures than they were in extinguishing them, perhaps archaeologists should look for another person to be accorded the title of “father” of their discipline.     

Derrida’s Paralogism of Writing: A Critique of Deconstructive Reasoning

This article is a critique of the flawed logic Derrida employed in articulating his program of a Grammatology for “deconstructing” Western philosophy. I argue that Derrida in several instances built his arguments around what Kant called the “paralogism.” I look at an often cited case in order to substantiate my claim: Derrida’s reading of Saussure, where his argument is based on a paralogism. Derrida misinterprets Saussure by seeing his alleged rejection of graphical writing as a rejection of his own idiosyncratic notion of “writing” (alias différance, trace, generalized writing, etc.), which only corresponds to Saussure’s own notion of “linguistic value,” produced in a system of differences without positive terms.     

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.     

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

This article explores the political, as opposed to the philosophical, impact of Leo Strauss’s exile in America on his thought. After a consideration of anti-Semitism and the importance Strauss attached to being a Jew, I argue that the fact that in America he no longer wrote in his Muttersprache but in English was central to his becoming a political theorist rather than a philosopher. Whereas as a philosopher he was unable to speak to the demos, as a political theorist what he needed was a group of “rhetors” who would carry a particular message to the demos.     

From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy

ABSTRACT

Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, “there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses.” As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological claim about the mind and its contents to an ontological claim about the nature of the world is the new focus on brain–mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. However, Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a “physical consideration of the mind.” What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with “an organical structure such as that of the brain” (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley’s source of “empirical data” regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley’s “vibratory neurophysiology” while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was, at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding “materialism” per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this “micro-tradition,” while emphasizing its problems.     

The Social and Literary Context of German Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān

Sa?di’s Golestān has been translated into German numerous times since the seventeenth century. The purpose of this article is to examine the social and literary context of three German translations and translators: Karl Heinrich Graf, a theologian and researcher of the Old Testament, published his translation of the Golestān in 1846 during German Romanticism; Dieter Bellmann, a professor of Oriental studies, published a revision of Graf’s Rosengarten in 1982 in the German Democratic Republic, where literature was strictly regulated; Kathleen Göpel published her indirect translation from English, prepared by the Afghan translator Omar Ali-Shah, in 1997, at a time of intercultural literature, also called “bridge literature.” Through examples the article shows how the context may have influenced their translations and how the text has changed when traveling across linguistic and cultural borders.     

Michael Polanyi's Social/Political Order: Design for a Society of Explorers

Abstract

Michael Polanyi's fascinations throughout his lifetime were threefold: (1) science—specifically physical chemistry; (2) philosophy—specifically epistemology and ontology; and (3) political society, understood, in the British tradition, to include economics. In developing his recommendations for political society, Polanyi draws broadly upon insights and even concepts from his experiences and reflections in both science and philosophy. His search for meaning in all of his philosophical works provides for him the definition of what he considers the most important human endeavor and is that which the political order must strive to encourage and protect. In addition, the gratification he found in the collegiality and conviviality of scientific research, conducted most productively in what Polanyi identified as “societies of explorers,” suggested to him the diverse groups—as in science, “polycentrically” ordered—and engaged in all kinds of productive activities that came to represent, for him, the grassroots source of a society's creative vitality. Having come to appreciate the necessity of freedom for scientific discovery, freedom became a paramount value in the model he proposed for political society. But this freedom, he realized, had to operate within the boundaries of legal and moral constraint if it was not to dissolve into the oppressions of anarchy. So we find in Polanyi's model of political society a dynamic very similar to that which he had developed in his epistemology: an indwelling of tradition for the purpose of social stability but also a “breaking-out” of established ways to engage in creative endeavors. Similarly, as Polanyi had recognized higher and lower “orders” of existence in his ontology that were necessary for the “emergence” of more comprehensive and novel entities, “greater than the sum of their parts,” he provided for a similar vertical, or qualitative, “layering” in his social order. These insights, and more, that Polanyi draws from his scientific and philosophical reflections in the process of constructing his model of a political society are what I attempt to develop in this essay.     

Founding Years of Clinical Neurology in Berlin Until 1933

During the so-called “Gründerjahre” or “founding years” in Berlin it became necessary to build new hospitals because of the rapid growth of population. As a result, several infirmaries, asylums for the insane and institutions for epileptics were built between 1877 and 1912. The new building of the University Neuropsychiatric Clinic (“Nervenklinik”) of the Charité was opened in 1905 according to plans made by Friedrich Jolly (1844–1904), the physician who named myasthenia gravis pseudoparalytica. A “Neurological Central Station”, under the direction of Oskar and Cecil Vogt, in existence since 1898, was a research center dedicated more to morphology. There the study of the structure of the cerebral cortex by Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1925) and research into basal ganglia diseases by the Vogts began. The Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Cerebral Research, which moved into a new building in 1931, also had its origin here. Hermann Oppenheim (1858–1919) promoted independent clinical neurology, as did his younger contemporary, Max Lewandowsky (1876–1918), who was already advising physician for neurology at the Berlin-Friedrichshain Hospital. Hugo Liepmann (1863–1925), the creator of apraxia theory, worked at the asylums for the insane in Dalldorf (Berlin-Wittenau) and Berlin-Herzberge. In 1911, the first neurological unit was established in the large hospital in Berlin-Buch under the direction of Otto Maas. Not until after World War I were further neurological hospital units founded, under the direction of Paul Schuster (1867–1940), Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965), Kurt Löwenstein (died in 1953) and Friedrich Heinrich Lewy (1885–1950). These Jewish physicians, as well as C.E. Benda and Otto Maas, had to leave their posts in 1933 and emigrate. The clinical institutions and scientific achievements of these pioneers of independent clinical neurology will be presented up to the point of its violent dissolution.     

Machiavelli’s passions

In his years as Florentine Secretary, Machiavelli repeatedly faced the problem of interpreting the gestures and words of statesmen that were masters of deception. The strategy he developed to uncover these statesmen’s intentions was based on the analysis of human passions, on uncovering the fundamental trait that defined a man’s character. I apply Machiavelli’s strategy of interpretation to Machiavelli himself and uncover the irreconcilable disconnect which shaped his personal tragedy. On one hand, he related to his objects of desire by entirely abandoning himself to them, regardless of how unachievable they were. On the other, to obtain these objects of desire his analytical mind developed strategies which took pride in their adherence to what he called the “effectual truth of the matter.” His incapacity to reconsider his objectives in light of the means at his disposal and his tendency to transfer all of himself into his objectives determined Machiavelli’s successes and failures. He repeatedly failed when he had to set his own goals, or when he approached a problem with empathy. He succeeded when he was given precise and limited objectives and when he understood that he did not share the goals of those he was studying.     

“Remember me”: Hamlet,memory and Bloom’s poiesis

Although memory is not explicitly named in “Hades”, it nonetheless features centrally. Intertextuality is an example of memory, and in “Hades” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is remembered – specifically the Ghost’s relation to Hamlet, whom he bids to “Remember” and “revenge”. Derrida calls this relation “hauntological”: it is characterised by an uncertain gaze, the father telling his son what to do, and the son mourning for his father. In Bloom’s mourning for his father, Virag, hauntology might be expected. However, it is Bloom’s late son, Rudy, who hauntologises Bloom, thereby revitalising the latter; this adjusts Shakespeare’s original hauntology. While considering repeatable ways of maintaining this hauntology, Bloom jocularly reverts to new technology: the phonograph and photograph. His plan reveals his relish for liminality and poiesis: being and non-being at the same time. Bloom is thus remembered into the future, all the while Ulysses is haunted by Hamlet.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung in Max Weber: A reconstruction of his linguistic usage

When Max Weber made use of the terms “Vergemeinschaftung” and “Vergesellschaftung” in the first chapter of “Economy and Society”, he was among other things alluding to Ferdinand Tönnies' well- known usage of “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft”, as well as to related conceptions in the work of Georg Simmel. However, Weber's usage not only differed from the senses in which Tönnies and Simmel used these terms; he had himself altered his own usage since the early draft of this chapter, published in 1913 as “On some Categories of Interpretive Sociology”. The tangled resonances that result from this are carefully identified and separated, and in so doing light is shed upon the nature and status of Weber's intentions in writing his important chapter on “Basic Sociological Categories”.     

The Clerk, the Thief, His Life as a Baker: Ashton Embry and the Supreme Court Leak Scandal

On December 16, 1919, Ashton Fox Embry, law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, abruptly resigned from the position he had held for almost nine years. His explanation? His fledgling bakery business required his undivided attention. Newspapers that morning hinted at a different reason: Embry resigned because he had conspired with at least three individuals to use inside knowledge of upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decisions to profit on Wall Street.2 A grand jury returned an indictment against Embry and his associates a few months later, and Embry’s argument that he had committed no crime ultimately reached the Supreme Court, the very institution he was accused of betraying. Despite the sensational headlines and fierce legal battle arising from his indictment, the United States Attorney quietly dismissed Embry’s case in 1929, almost ten years after the story had broken. Few Court scholars have ever heard of Embry, and the memory of Embry, much like the case against him, has disappeared with time.3 This article unravels the “Supreme Court Leak Case” by reconstructing what happened almost eighty years ago.