Degeneration under the microscope at the fin se siecle

Annals of Science

Volumn 66, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 455-471

  Lawrence, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NERVE DEGENERATION; POST MORTEM; TWENTIETH CENTURY; WALLERIAN DEGENERATION;

PATHOLOGY;

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; METHODOLOGY; MICROSCOPY; PATHOLOGY; RETINA MACULA DEGENERATION;

HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MACULAR DEGENERATION; MICROSCOPY;

EID: 71049142151     PISSN: 00033790     EISSN: 1464505X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00033790903005426     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. The best study of degeneration theory, especially in Britain, is Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989).
2. Eric T. Carlson, 'Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Praxis', in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York, 1985), 121-144 This is a most useful survey but in spite of its promising title confines itself to the usual flagrant examples of degeneration theory without enquiring into everyday clinical medicine.
3. Pick repeatedly emphasises how his study is concerned with the constitution and stabilization of a language of degeneration. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 7, 179, 214-215
4. Augustus Volney Waller, 'Experiments on the Section of the Glossopharyngeal and Hypoglossal Nerves of the Frog, and Observations on the Alterations Produced thereby in the Structure of their Primitive Fibres', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 140 (1850), 423-29, 425, 426.
5. Sidney Ochs, 'Waller's Concept of the Trophic Dependence of the Nerve Fiber on the Cell Body in the Light of Early Neuron Theory', Clio Medica, 10 (1975), 253-66, 253. My italics.
6. Edwin Clarke and CD. O'Malley, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord, 2nd edition (San Francisco, 1996), 70-74.
7. John M.S. Pearce, Fragments of Neurological History (London, 2003), 57.
8. Alan H. Sykes, Servants of Medicine: Augustus Waller-Father and Son Physiologists (York, 2004), Chapter 4.
9. The Abstract' of Waller's Croonian Lecture of 1870 makes no mention of degeneration only of the nerve being 'disintegrated' and 'disorganized'. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 18 (1870), 339-43, 339.
10. E.A. Schaffer, 'The Nerve Cell' edited by E.A. Schaffer, Text-Book of Physiology, edited by E.A. Schaffer, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1900), vol.II, 601. Italics in original.
11. The term is much older but the OED dates its use in biology to only three years earlier, 1848.
12. James Paget, 'On Fatty Degeneration of the Small Blood-Vessels of the Brain and its Relation to Apoplexy', London Medical Gazette, 1850, 1-9. (Seen only as offprint, 1850.)
13. Hanfield Jones and Edward Sieveking, A Manual of Pathological Anatomy (London, 1854), 154, 280, 244.
14. William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Physiology, 5th edition (London, 1855), 316, 318, 331-332
15. Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (London, 1992), 38.
16. John C. Egan, Syphilitic Diseases: Their Pathology, Diagnosis, and Treatment (London, 1853).
17. See Claude Quetel, History of Syphilis (Cambridge, 1990), Chapter 6.
18. Charles Wilson, The Pathology of Drunkenness (Edinburgh, 1855).
19. Edward Henry Sieveking, On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures: Their Causes, Pathology and Treatment, 2nd edition (London, 1858), Chapter VII.
20. Thomas Reade, Syphilitic Affections of the Nervous System (London, 1867).
21. B.A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espece humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris and Londres, 1857).
22. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).
23. Eugene S. Talbot, Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results (London, 1898), 20.
24. See also Eugene S. Talbot, Developmental Pathology: A Study in Degenerative Evolution (Boston, [c. 1911]).
25. Julius Althaus, On Scrivener's Palsy and its Treatment by Galvanisation of the Cervical Sympathetic Nerve (London, 1870), 1, 5, 7.
26. Edward Long Fox, The Pathological Anatomy of the Nervous Centres (London, 1874), 90-92, 112, 121, 179, 186, 308.
27. John Syer Bristowe, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Medicine (London, 1876), 78, 941-42, 927, 994-995
28. Quetel, History of Syphilis, 134.
29. Pick frequently points out the reluctance of British authors to adopt a full-blown view of national or racial degeneration, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 184.
30. C. Pitfield Mitchell, Dissolution and Evolution and the Science of Medicine: An Attempt to Co-ordinate the Necessary Facts of Pathology and to Establish the First Principles of Treatment (London, 1888), v, 5, 53-54.
31. Dissolution and Evolution and the Science of Medicine: An Attempt to Co-ordinate the Necessary Facts of Pathology and to Establish the First Principles of Treatment , Ibid., 162-167
32. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 203-216 I say versions since Pick shows how Maudsley formulated degeneration theory optimistically and pessimistically at different times.
33. Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (London, 1867), 201, 214, 368, 394-95, 400, 402.
34. Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind: Being the Third Edition of the Second Part of the 'Physiology & Pathology of Mind', Recast, Enlarged and Rewritten (London, 1879), 490, 515.
35. Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ, 1998).
36. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1992).
37. Francis Gotch, 'Nerve' in Schäffer, Text-Book, 451, 459. It is noteworthy though, in spite of the supremacy of the nervous system, how the activities of other systems of the body were being transformed into electrical signals, for instance, those of the heart into the electrocardiogram.
38. Robert M. Young , Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York, 1990).
39. See Sykes, Servants of Medicine. In jest perhaps, but in one quip the younger Waller summed up the thesis of this paper. He reportedly said, 'I am the Wallerian degeneration'.
40. Augustus Désiré Waller, An Introduction to Human Physiology (London, 1891), 352, 365. All italics in original.
41. C.W. Suckling, On the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Brain, Spinal Cord and Nerves (London, 1887), 17, 142.
42. William Osler, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1892), 892-93, 780, 949-950
43. On the reaction of degeneration, Osler cites Allen Starr, 'Lectures on Neuritis', Medical Record (New York, 1887).
44. For a survey and a case study from a slightly later period see Christopher Lawrence, Rockefeller Money, the Laboratory and Medicine in Edinburgh: New Science in an Old Country (Rochester, NY, 2005).
45. On Mott's scientific credentials and his relation to Henry Maudsley see Rhodri Hayward, 'Germany and the Making of "English" Psychiatry: The Maudsley Hospital, 1908-1939', in Inspiration, Co-operation, Migration: British-American-German Relations in Psychiatry, 1870-1945, edited by Volker Roelcke and Paul Weindling (Rochester, NY, forthcoming).
46. Frederick W Mott, The Croonian Lectures on the Degeneration of the Neurone (London, 1900), 18, 25, 21, 38, 84, 57, 64, 11, 86, 33, 15, 25-6, 86, 67-9, 86-90. Italics in original throughout. I did not always find Mott clear on the difference between primary and secondary degeneration. They are not the same as inherited and acquired. A primary degeneration may have an hereditary component which requires a poison to activate it.
47. There is now a considerable literature on scientific objects. See Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago, 2000).
48. F.W Mott, 'Introduction to Neuropathology' in A System of Medicine. By Many Writers, edited by Clifford Allbutt and Humphry Davy Rolleston, 2nd edition, 8 vols (London, 1905-1911), vol.VII, 'Diseases of the Muscles, the Trophoneuroses, Diseases of the Nerves, Vertebral Column, and Spinal Cord', 173-289, 173-44, 199.
49. F.W Mott, 'Heredity and Eugenics in Relation to Insanity', in 'Problems in Eugenics', Being Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress, London, 1912 (London, 1912), 10, 12, 13-14.
50. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 184.
51. Robert A. Fleming, A Short Practice of Medicine (London, 1919), 265-268
52. Smith, Inhibition, 38, 40.
53. Indeed, at one point, even Mott talks of the degenerated neurone being 'disorganized'. Mott 'Introduction to Neuropathology', 174.
54. For an account of how nuanced and interpenetrating pessimistic and optimistic views of degeneration could be, see Richard Barnett, 'Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H.G. Wells and The Outline ofHistory', Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 37 (2006), 203-299