How we may think: Imaging and writing technologies across the history of the neurosciences

Imagining the brain as a book: Oskar and Cécile Vogt's "library of brains"

In 1927, the German popular science magazine Die Koralle published an article entitled "The Library of Brains." The article was about the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin, established in 1914 as the continuation of the "Neurological Central Station" founded by Oskar Vogt (1870-1959) in 1898. The library metaphor plays on the huge collection of human and animal brains Oskar and his wife Cécile (1875-1862) had gathered over several decades. For examination, the brains were cut into paper-thin slices and embedded in paraffin: from one single organ, up to 30,000 slices could be extracted, which were to be "read" and studied like the pages of a book. In this chapter, we take the metaphor at face value, arguing that Vogt's institute actually functioned as a library. Numerous publications have emphasized the role of the Vogts and, in particular, of the brain collection for the constitution of modern neuroscience. The "library," however, has never been closely investigated. How was it designed? How was it filled? According to which criteria were the brains collected and ordered? How did the order and the collection itself reflect the Vogts' research program? Through a detailed investigation of the collection and the Vogt Archive, we will examine this "library" and reconstruct the order of the Vogt brains. The mutual relationship between collecting, sorting, examining and publishing about the brain will be discussed.

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Labeling, Recovering and Reactivating: The Role of Labels on Microscope Slides in the Finding System on the Basis of Alzheimer's Auguste D. Preparations. This study discusses the role of labels in the process of the reactivation (Rheinberger) of preparations. Labels on slides together with corresponding lists on cards or sheets build what is here called a specific finding system. In the sciences of the archive (Daston) the disciplinary memory together with such a finding system are the basis to the ability of the sciences today to reactivate preparations from the beginning of the last century as it occurs with the Auguste D. preparations. The case of Alzheimer's micropreparations of brain parts of Auguste D. - the case that he used to show that hers was a specific brain disease unknown before - serves to describe Alzheimer's writing on the labels. It is compared to slides and labels prepared by other medical researchers between the 1890s and 1920s and the respective finding systems. Being an epistemologicum, micropreparations, as they are data, in their hybrid status of both image and material in one, cross the boundaries between icon and index. This is proven by the reactivation of Auguste D. micropreparations in molecular biological studies over 100 years after their production.

Vital brains: On the entanglement of media, minds, and models

The advent of functional imaging, hailed as a breakthrough for marrying morphological and functional approaches in brain research, invites a reflection upon the interplay between models, instruments, and theories. Brain research and theorizing about the brain are generally mediated by the research technologies employed. Going back into the history of brain research, the chapter explores the epistemic effects of research technologies by focusing on the localization debate in relation to different visualization strategies. In this way, one can differentiate between abstracting and concretizing approaches to brain modeling. These approaches form the basis for introducing the concept of vital abstraction by revisiting Grey Walter's The Living Brain. Walter's adventures in visualizing brain activity and constructing lively toys are described as a form of brain theorizing that is anchored in empirical research but focuses on the brain's vital activity instead of identifying morphological and structural details. The concept of vital abstraction is further explored by applying the concept of epistemic virtues to evaluate current brain models and for coming to terms with the dynamics of brain research.

Slicing the cortex to study mental illness: Alois Alzheimer's pictures of equivalence

Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) was a German physician who specialized in psychiatry, and who is today known for the first description of a-in his own words-peculiar ailment (eigenartige Erkrankung), which was named after him. In his time, however, he was foremost recognized for his work in refining histopathological techniques and thereby contributing to the methodological arsenal for differential diagnosis in clinical psychiatry. In his laboratory that was based at the renowned Munich Psychiatric University Clinic led by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), Alzheimer, his assistants, and students conserved, prepared, and studied slices of deceased patients' brains under the microscope. How could histological postmortem research better clinical diagnoses? Against what norm should the pathologies be compared? What was the normal brain in a context of highly invasive preparation techniques and the artifacts that they produced? In an unpublished lecture series, Alzheimer explicitly addressed these questions and framed them in terms of practical problems and possible solutions: where to get normal brains from; how animal studies could help to enlighten the normal brain and infectious mental disorders; how the study of hereditary idiocy might yield knowledge about normal brain development and general brain pathology. This chapter offers a close reading of parts of Alzheimer's lectures, his habilitation thesis, and his programmatic opening paper of a journal that he cofounded. These sources provide us with an introduction into the making of the normal and the pathological brain in histopathology that focuses more on problems and controversies than providing an undisputable, easy-to-use framework. I examine the premises of Alzheimer's conceptualization of "pictures of equivalence" (Aequivalentbilder) to elucidate how the epistemological gap between postmortem research and clinical psychiatry was managed in this particular context. The excavation of this historical epistemology not only fills a gap in the rich history of brain research that has mostly focused on brain localization theory, of which Alzheimer and Kraepelin were skeptical. It also provides a case study for how "the normal" and "the pathological" were put to work, and were, literally, pictured. In conjunction with the other chapters of this volume, this contribution thereby raises the historiographical and philosophical question of what to include into an assessment of the making and use of models of the brain.