Die Geschichte der genetisch orientierten Hirnforschung von Cécile und Oskar Vogt (1875-1962, 1870-1959) in der Zeit von 1895 bis ca. 1927 (review)

Helga Satzinger. Die Geschichte der genetisch orientierten Hirnforschung von Cécile und Oskar Vogt (1875-1962, 1870-1959) in der Zeit von 1895 bis ca. 1927. Braunschweiger Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Pharmazie und der Naturwissenschaften, no. 41. Stuttgart: Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, 1998. 365 pp. Ill. DM 45.00 (paperbound).

Aside from the Curies and the Déjerines there is in science hardly a married couple as famous as the Vogts. Helga Satzinger's book (The history of genetically oriented brain research by Cécile and Oskar Vogt from 1895 to circa 1927) deserves international attention. Born in Paris in 1875, Cécile Mugnier was five years younger than her future husband, born during the Franco-Prussian war in Husum, Schleswig-Holstein. In 1899, both in their twenties, they met through the Déjerines, when Oskar Vogt gave a talk in Paris; they married against his mother's wishes. Cécile was a student of Pierre Marie, who later donated thirty brains to the couple. Their two daughters also became natural scientists. By 1900, when he was thirty, Oskar Vogt had published thirty-six items under his own name plus one together with Cécile (who by then had two of her own). For many years Cécile was not allowed to take part in public discussion or to practice her specialty. The eventual total of their combined publications was fifty-one, and of her own, fifteen.

Oskar Vogt began his career as a practicing psychiatrist and neurologist in Jena; he then moved to Switzerland, working in Zurich and Kreuzlingen under Otto and Robert Binswanger and August Forel. His first publication, on corpus callosum fibers, dealt with hypnotism, hysteria, and aphasia. He became coeditor of the Zeitschrift für Hypnotism, which was then the only German journal of psychotherapy; it became the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, with Vogt as the sole editor. In adopting Forel's idea, based on Wilhelm Griesinger, Vogt promoted the theory that mental disorders were the result of a diseased cerebral organ. He also adhered to the eugenic movement, sexual reforms, and pacifism, and was socialistically inclined--points Satzinger says she will not discuss. What she does discuss, however, is the Vogt-Flechsig controversy: the former in favor of a democratic against the latter's monarchistic cerebral model.

Most of Oskar Vogt's early publications were psychiatric. With the establishment of a controversial Neurobiological Institute in Berlin-Buch--thanks to the (paradoxical) support of the arms manufacturer Krupp (also one of Vogt's patients)--and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (later Max Planck Gesellschaft), the Vogts became central figures in neurological progress. They earned their professional titles during World War I. With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Vogt was accused of supporting Jews and Communists and lost his leading position in Berlin. With the help of Krupp he established laboratories in the Black Forest (Neustadt), while a Russian couple--Nicolai and Helen Timofëeff-Ressovsky--were allowed to continue their research on genotypes at the Berlin institute; until then the Vogt Laboratory had been shared by Korbinian Brodmann (1868-1918), famous for his map of the human cortex (in successful competition with Oskar Vogt's similar efforts), which counted two hundred areas. Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) criticized Vogt's attempt to localize psychological functions, as did Rudolf Hassler, a disciple of Vogt.

Satzinger--a neuroanatomist herself with a thesis on the subject, based on neuroarchitectonics--suggests that in 1902 the concept of neurophysiology was possibly used for the first time by the Vogts, based on their anatomical and electrophysiological research on apes, monkeys, and other mammals. But in 1906 they were not followers of the neuron theory proposed by Waldeyer in 1891, and...