Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns (review)

Michael Hagner, ed. Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1999. 352 pp. Ill. DM 48.00; öS 350.00; Sw. Fr. 46.00 (paperbound).

This collection of thoughtful articles includes an introduction by the editor emphasizing the rising interest in the brain in the period "between Bismarck and Hitler," its "cultivation" extending even to economists. This was "an era of nervousness," an era in which Vogt was invited to Moscow to dissect Lenin's brain, and the twelve articles reflect the diversity of approaches to this organ during the nineteenth century.

Herbert Müller-Sievers's contribution, "About the Nerve Ropes" (all translations of titles are my own), begins by analyzing Georg Büchner's 1971 book On the Nervous System of the Barbel (a sensory filament on the head of some fishes). Müller-Sievers harkens to Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-94), one of the founders of embryology, as well as Goethe, Descartes, Soemmering, and Hegel. Sven Dierig's "Brain Webs at the Piano: On Chopinised Nerve Strings in fin-de-siècle Berlin" reviews the interplay between music and neurology. Andrew Mayer's "From Galton's Superimposed Photos to Freud's Dream Figures: Psychometric and Psychoanalytic Staging of Types and Cases" reminds us that in the late 1870s Sir Francis Galton worked with so-called pictorial statistics. Cornelius Borck's "Strings for Feeling and Arms for Catching: Metaphors of the Organic as the Basis for Cerebral Research" deals with Freud's comparison of the brain with the protoplasmic processes of the amoeba (or the jellyfish). In Doris Kaufmann's "Brains That Can Resist and Souls Unwilling to Fight: Concerning the History of the First World War's Mentality and Science," we read an account of the medical and official attitudes to war neuroses and their contemporary "scientification."

Christina Chamisso's "The Mind and the Faculties" is a discussion of the aggressive reciprocity between historically, nationally, and specialty-oriented influences in the professional literature of the West. In "OK Computer," Simon Schaffer draws the analogy between the brain as a machine and the machine as a brain. J. Andrew Mendelsohn discusses "The Savage Brain: On Nature and Art in the Period of Structuralism." Henning Schmidgen's chapter, "Figures of the Cerebral in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze," explores the separation of psychology and philosophy toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus Ecce Cortex is an interesting mirror of German attitudes toward the history of this organ.

Francis Schiller
University of California, San Francisco

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