A Hole in the Head
Page 14
THE ACCURACY OF THE DISSECTIONS
There has been a long debate on the accuracy of the forearm dissection in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. One issue was whether it was the arm of another body, since usually the viscera are exposed first and some thought the joining of the arm to the body was odd. Another issue was the accuracy of the dissection itself, partly because some relevant landmarks are not clearly seen. However, recent investigations—including one that compared Rembrandt’s depiction to a “dissected left forearm of a Dutch male cadaver” and not just to drawings in anatomy textbooks—seem to indicate that Rembrandt was astonishingly accurate in his depiction of the anatomy of the arm.26
Figure 7.6
The title page of Tulp’s Observationum Medicarum (1641) illustrating four of his “cases.” The top drawing shows a blacksmith who removed his own large kidney stone with the help of his young son. The left figure shows a man with an inserted wooden tube to drain accumulated ascites fluid. The right figure is a woman with multiple ovarian tumors. The bottom figure is the “corang-utang,” actually a chimpanzee, later reproduced by Tyson(1699) and by Huxley (1863). From Dudok van Heel, 1998.
In 2000 the neuroanatomist Laurence Garey and the historian of medicine William Schupbach had a more critical attitude to The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman.27 First, they claimed that Rembrandt had eliminated “at least a cubic foot” between the body’s head and foot. In a more serious criticism, they claim that Dr. Deijman had cut the falx (the dura between the two hemispheres) and turned it around to show its crescent-shaped side to the viewer. Falx is Latin for scythe, often carried by the personification of death. They suggest this was some kind of a pun by Deijman or Rembrandt.
THE SUBJECTS OF THE DISSECTIONS
Tulp is dissecting the body of Aris Kint, a “habitual” petty criminal who found prison life so awful that he apparently tried to stab a guard in order to get a death sentence—which he succeeded in doing.
Deijman is dissecting the body of Joris Fontejin, who, with his girlfriend, was trying to rob a textile shop when he injured one of the shop assistants who tried to stop him. That Fonteijn was carrying a pistol may have contributed to the severity of the sentence.28
REMBRANDT AND CHE GUEVARA
In this chapter I noted the suggestion of the art critic John Berger that Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (figure 7.4) was the model for the famous Christlike picture of the murdered Che Guevara (figure 7.7). Indeed the organization of the two works is certainly strikingly similar. However, the Bolivian photographer who took the picture, Freddy Alborta, has insisted in a film about the photograph, El Día Que Me Quieras (Leandro Katz, 1999), that the similarity of the two was coincidental and that he was unfamiliar with the Rembrandt. Apparently, the photographer remained largely unknown to the public until Katz’s film about him.
Figure 7.7
The Corpse of Che Guevara, Freddy Alborta, 1967. After capturing and executing Che in 1967, before burying him in a secret site, the executioners posed for this group photo with the body to demonstrate that Che was really dead. Later the body was exhumed and now rests in an elaborate churchlike memorial in Santa Clara, Cuba. This photograph has been named as one of the “10 Photographs that Changed the World” (www.arkitectrue.com/10-photographs-that-changed-the-world, accessed October 1, 2008). Used by kind permission of the Estate of Freddy Alborta Trigo, La Paz, Bolivia.
NOTES
This chapter (excepting the postscript) was originally published in Trends in Neurosciences (21: 237–240 [1998], “Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deijman”).
1. Middelkoop, 1994; Rosenberg, 1968.
2. Schama, 1987.
3. Rosenberg, 1968.
4. Middelkoop, 1994; Rosenberg, 1968; White, 1984; Heckscher, 1958; Hansen, 1996.
5. Singer, 1957; Gross, 1998a.
6. Middelkoop, 1994; White, 1984; Heckscher, 1958; Hansen, 1996; Rupp, 1992; Cazort et al., 1996.
7. Held, 1991.
8. Middelkoop, 1994; Heckscher, 1958; Hansen, 1996; Rupp, 1992; Cazort et al., 1996.
9. Heckscher, 1958.
10. Hansen, 1996; Rupp, 1992; Bal, 1991.
11. Hansen, 1996; Rupp, 1992.
12. Heckscher, 1958.
13. Heckscher, 1958; Hansen, 1996.
14. White, 1984; Clark, 1978.
15. Weschler, 2006.
16. Middelkoop, 1994.
17. Middelkoop, 1994.
18. Saunders and O’Malley, 1950
19. Gross, 1998a, figure 1.8.
20. Saunders and O’Malley, 1950.
21. Rosenberg, 1968; White, 1984.
22. White, 1984.
23. The most detailed account of the life, work, political career, and social context of Tulp is the lavishly illustrated Dudok van Heel, 1998. Other recent papers on Tulp are Kruger, 2005; Simpson, 2007, and Mellick, 2007.
24. Tulp called it an “orang-outang,” and his drawing of it (figure 7.6) was reproduced in Tyson’s (1699) founding primatology work and in Huxley’s classic Man’s Place in Nature (1863) where he noted, correctly, “It is plainly a Chimpanzee.”
25. Dudok van Heel, 1998; Kruger, 2005; Simpson, 2007; Mellick, 2007.
26. I Jpma et al., 2006; Mills, 1989; Alting and Waterbolk, 1982; Lindeboom, 1977; Jackowe et al., 2007.
27. Reed, 2000; Anonymous, Imperial College Reporter, 2000 http://www.imperial.ac.uk/ P2496.htm (accessed February 25, 2009).
28. Dudok van Heel, 1998.
III
SCIENTISTS WHO WERE “BEFORE THEIR TIME”
Often in the history of science, when a scientist’s ideas or interpretations are too novel, they are rejected or simply ignored. Of course, in most of these cases the new ideas turn out to be wrong. Much more rarely, these ideas become accepted as major insights decades or even centuries later: they had been “before their time.” This part of the book examines five rather different cases of discoveries or ideas that later became important in neuroscience but were not appreciated or understood in their time. In each case we consider why the scientists’ contemporaries ignored their work.
The first case is Claude Bernard, the most famous French scientist of the nineteenth century and arguably of all time. Although his experimental discoveries were immediately accepted, his central theoretical idea that the constancy of the internal environment is necessary for the development of a complex nervous system had no meaning until about 50 years later.
Bartolomeo Panizza is a rather different case. In the middle of the nineteenth century he produced the first clear experimental evidence for localization of function in the cerebral cortex; specifically, he located a visual area in the posterior cerebral cortex in a variety of animals including humans. Yet this work went unrecognized until after the establishment of cortical localization by Broca (1861) and Fritsch and Hitzig (1870) and then the rediscovery of a posterior visual area by Munk (1881).
The third case is that of Joseph Altman, who in the 1960s overturned the dogma, as old as modern neuroscience, that no new neurons are made in the brains of adult mammals. Although prominently and repeatedly published and even replicated, his findings were ignored until about thirty years later.
The fourth case, Donald Griffin, is someone who was ahead of his time in two ways. First, he discovered (with Robert Galambos) something previously inconceivable, namely that bats could navigate with an amazingly accurate sonar-like system, echolocation. Second, in the face of much skepticism and even ridicule he restored the study of animal consciousness to experimental science, from which it had been expelled by the rise of behaviorism. Griffin was my first scientific mentor, and this memoir of his life and work is written in appreciation of that role.
The final case involves several investigators. In the 1960s Jerzy Konorski hypothesized the existence of neurons whose activity would code for complex visual percepts such as a face. Jerry Lettvin speculated about a cell that might code the percept of your grandmother, hence the term grand
mother cell. Subsequently, my colleagues and I found cells that would fire selectively to facial images, but it took another twelve years before anyone tried to repeat our results (and they were successful) and another seven years until similar mechanisms were sought in humans.
In my previous Tales in the History of Neuroscience I recounted a more extreme case of neglect. In the eighteenth century, when the cerebral cortex was usually considered to have only a “rind” function, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) argued for sensory and motor function and even a type of “quasi-neuron” theory. Yet his theories remained unknown until the twentieth century, by which time many of his ideas had been confirmed.
Resistance by scientists to new ideas and discoveries may not be rare. Herman von Helmholtz (1821–1894), writing to Michael Faraday (1791– 1867), noted:
The greatest benefactors of mankind usually do not obtain a full reward during their lifetime, and . . . new ideas need more time for gaining general assent the more really original they are. (Barber, 1961)
Max Planck (1858–1947) commented about some new ideas in his doctoral dissertation:
None of my professors at the University had any understanding for its contents. . . . I found no interest let alone approval, even among the professors who were closely connected with the topic. Helmholtz probably did not even read the paper at all. . . .
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Barber, 1961; italics mine)
8
CLAUDE BERNARD AND THE CONSTANCY OF THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT
Claude Bernard (1813–1878) was the founder of modern experimental physiology and one of the most famous French scientists of all time (figure 8.1). Today, his fame rests primarily (if not entirely) on his idea that the maintenance of the stability of the internal environment (milieu interieur) is a prerequisite for the development of a complex nervous system.1 In Bernard’s time, his many experimental discoveries in physiology were widely recognized and he received virtually every honor possible for a scientist in France. Yet, his conception of the internal environment had no impact for more than 50 years after its formulation. In this essay, after his life and major work are summarized, some reasons both for the delay in the recognition of this idea and for its subsequent importance to the physiology of the first quarter of the twentieth century are examined.
LIFE AND MAJOR WORK
Claude Bernard came from poor peasant stock in the Rhone Valley. At the age of 19, after some nonscientific education, he was apprenticed to a local pharmacist. Bernard was more interested in writing plays, however, and set out for Paris in 1834 to seek his fortune in the theater. He showed his play Arthur de Bretagne to an illustrious critic of the day. The critic, learning of Bernard’s previous job and apparently more impressed by his energy than by the play, suggested he try medicine instead of literature. (The critic and Bernard were later to be fellow “Immortals” in the French Academy.) Bernard was an indifferent medical student; nonetheless, he somehow fell into the hands and laboratory of François Magendie (1783–1855), professor of medicine at the College de France and head of one of the first laboratories devoted to experimental physiology.2
Figure 8.1
Portrait of Claude Bernard.
Magendie’s father had been an active Republican in the French Revolution and, following Rousseau, had brought up his son as a free spirit. Magendie became a thoroughgoing materialist and was heavily influenced by the Ideologues, a group of revolutionary philosophers led by Pierre Cabanis (1757–1808) and A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836). They rejected Cartesian dualism, vigorously asserting that the mind was a “mere” function of the body and as Cabanis put it that “the brain was a bodily organ that...digestsimpressions and...secretes thought.”3
Magendie had contempt for social convention and utter contempt for contemporary theories of medicine—indeed for the very idea of “theory” in science. For him, science meant only experiments and the facts that could be unambiguously and directly derived from them. He raised empiricism to a faith and denied that he was guided by hypotheses (as he obviously often was).
Before Magendie, much of physiology had been speculation and inference from anatomy and clinical medicine. Magendie established the importance of direct experiments on living mammals, usually cats, dogs, and rabbits. Even after their discovery in the 1840s, anesthetic agents were often not used in animal experiments, perhaps because of their depressing effect on nervous function: in this period experiments on the neural control of physiological function or on the nervous system itself were of central concern. In Magendie’s (and Bernard’s) time there was much less popular opposition to vivisection in France than in Great Britain; with the rise of a strong British antivivisection movement toward the end of the nineteenth century, this difference became even more pronounced.4
Perhaps Magendie’s most famous discovery was of the law of spinal roots, also known as the Bell-Magendie law (i.e., that ventral spinal roots are motor and dorsal ones sensory). There was a long and bitter priority controversy with Charles Bell (1774–1842) over its discovery. In fact, Bell had originally proposed only the sensory functions of the dorsal roots; there is no reason to believe that Magendie knew of Bell’s claims before he carried out and published his own experiments. Both halves of the law were physiologically demonstrated by Magendie, whereas the Englishman Bell (not a vivisectionist) had inferred the functions of the dorsal roots solely from anatomical observation.5
From Magendie, Bernard acquired a profound skepticism of established dogma and learned the techniques of vivisection that were the basis of the new animal physiology. He never practiced medicine and instead concentrated on research, eventually taking over Magendie’s laboratory and chair. Bernard made a number of major experimental discoveries and theoretical advances that established him as the founder of modern physiology. Among his most important discoveries were the glycogenic function of the liver, the role of the pancreas in digestion, the regulation of temperature by vasomotor nerves (see box 8.1 and figure 8.2), the action of curare and carbon monoxide, and the vagal control of cardiac function. Most of this work was done early in his career, between 1843 and 1858, in a small damp cellar and with little funding.6
Although he continued some laboratory work for the rest of his life, Bernard became increasingly involved in two other concerns. The first was the political goal of establishing physiology, “experimental medicine,” as an independent discipline. He was particularly concerned about separating it from clinical medicine, with its emphasis on intuition and “touch,” and from chemistry, with its claims that the inorganic and organic could be treated equivalently. His second major interest was in broad theoretical issues such as the role of determinism in biology, the relation of theory and experimentation in biology, and the existence of phenomena common to both plants and animals and absent in the inorganic world. Among his new and important theoretical concepts were those of internal secretions, reciprocal innervation, and, as we discuss in detail below, the internal milieu.7
Figure 8.2
Claude Bernard in his laboratory (Académie Nationale de Médicine, Paris). See box 8.1.
Box 8.1
Claude Bernard in His Laboratory
Figure 8.2 is an anonymous copy of a painting by L. A. L’hermitte made ten years after Bernard’s death (Académie Nationale de Médicine, Paris). Bernard is the central figure, wearing an apron, and is surrounded by some of his most famous French students (Paul Bert, mentioned in the text, is standing third from the left). The setting is Bernard’s laboratory at the College de France, which still can be visited today. The experiment illustrated is one in which the vasomotor functions of sympathetic nerves were demonstrated for the first time. Bernard is studying the effect of unilaterally cutting and stimulating the cut end of the cervical sympathetic nerve on the temperature of each side of the head of a rab
bit. He discusses this experiment in An Introduction to the Experimental Study of Medicine (1865) to illustrate two principles of experimentation. The first was the importance of the choice of species, the rabbit being ideal here because the cervical sympathetic vascular nerves, unlike in other common laboratory animals, run separately from sensory and motor nerves.
The second was the value of hypotheses, even when wrong, as in this case.
On the basis of a prevailing theory and of earlier observations I had been led . . . to make the hypothesis that the temperature should be reduced . . . after severing the cervical sympathetic nerve in the neck. . . . The result was . . . precisely the reverse of what my hypothesis, deduced from theory, had led me to expect; thereupon I did as I always do, that is to say, I at once abandoned theories and hypothesis, to observe and study the fact itself. . . . Today my experiments on the vascular and thermo-regulatory nerves have opened a new path for investigation and are the subject of numerous studies which, I hope, may some day yield really important results in physiology and pathology. This example . . . proves that in experiments we may meet with results different from what theories and hypothesis lead us to expect. . . . This . . . example . . . gives us an important lesson, to wit: without the original guiding hypothesis, the experimental fact which contradicted it would never have been perceived. . . . Indeed I was not the first experimenter to cut this part of the cervical sympathetic in living animals. . . . But none of them noticed the local temperature phenomenon . . . though this phenomenon must necessarily have occurred. . . . The hypothesis . . . had prepared my mind [and my predecessors’] for seeing things in a certain direction. . . . We had the fact under our eyes and did not see it because it conveyed nothing to our mind. However, it could not be simpler to perceive, and since I described it, every physiologist without exception has noted and verified it with the greatest ease. (Bernard, 1961 [1865])