„Ein zu internationaler Berühmtheit gelangter Forscher und Arzt“: Otfrid Foerster (1873–1941) als Nobelpreiskandidat

ZusammenfassungDieser Aufsatz befasst sich mit den Nobelpreisnominierungen für den Neurologen und Neurochirurgen Otfrid Foerster (1873–1941). Foerster wurde 17 Mal für den Nobelpreis für Physiologie oder Medizin nominiert. Aufbauend auf Akten des Stockholmer Nobelpreisarchives, Primär- und Sekundärliteratur wird auf folgende Fragen eingegangen: Welche Gründe gab es für Foersters Nominierungen? Wie sah die Beziehung zwischen ihm und seinen Nominatoren aus? Warum hat er letztlich den Nobelpreis nicht erhalten? Das Gros der Nominatoren für Foerster hob als Hauptmotiv sein gemeinsam mit Oswald Bumke herausgegebenes Handbuch der Neurologie hervor. Den Nominatoren zufolge hatte Foerster mit diesem Handbuch einen enormen Einfluss auf die Neurologie seiner Zeit. Darüber hinaus wurde sein „ehrenvoller Charakter“ in den Nominierungsbriefen unterstrichen. Für das Nobelkomitee waren diese Begründungen jedoch nicht ausreichend: Die Mitglieder stuften das Handbuch nicht als originäre Forschungsleistung ein. Foersters Ruhm reicht trotzdem bis in die Gegenwart, etwa in Form einer seit 1953 von der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Neurochirurgie vergebenen Ehrung, die seinen Namen trägt (Otfrid-Foerster-Medaille).

Paradigm Shift

Kraepelin’s influence in renaming melancholia “depression” was enormous. But that alone would not suffice to explain why, an ocean away and a hundred years later, everybody became depressed. Mediators were needed to carry the doctrine of depression to the discipline of psychiatry, and then to individual patients. Those mediators were the American psychoanalysts, many of them distinguished migrants from Europe, and they gave pride of place to neurotic depression. Other mediators extracted depression and anxiety from the pool of nerves and yoked them together, making mixed depression-anxiety the favored disorder. To gain some perspective: In the first third of the twentieth century, in a great paradigm shift that transferred behavioral disorders from neurology to psychiatry, the spotlight shift ed from nerves, a diagnosis that implicated the whole body, to mood, a diagnosis that implicated mainly the mind. Mental illness triumphed over nervous illness, and depression became the main mood diagnosis. In 1908, Oswald Bumke, a psychiatrist then at the university psychiatric hospital in Freiburg, Germany (later to become professor of psychiatry in Munich), scolded the family physicians who never suspected depression in their wealthy patients whom they sent from spa to spa and sanatorium to sanatorium for the treatment of nondisease (symptoms without organic causes). The family doctors, who doubtlessly suspected the symptoms were of psychological origin, focused on the symptoms themselves; Bumke, more interested in mental than in physical symptoms, focused on what he believed the underlying cause to be: “depression,” as manifest in symptoms such as tiredness or an anxious preoccupation with their bodily health. For clinicians of Bumke’s generation, depression was a familiar concept. In understanding the rise of depression there are two questions that have to be sorted out: Why the depression diagnosis becomes so common and why depressive symptoms become divorced from the nervous syndrome and take on a life of their own as an affective disorder. Because events on both tracks happen around the same time, the narratives interblend, but they are separate stories. To foreshadow, it was American psychoanalysis that first put depression in the spotlight.

Neuroscience in Nazi Europe Part II: Resistance against the Third Reich

Previously, I mentioned that not all neuroscientists collaborated with the Nazis, who from 1933 to 1945 tried to eliminate neurologic and psychiatric disease from the gene pool. Oskar and Cécile Vogt openly resisted and courageously protested against the Nazi regime and its policies, and have been discussed previously in the neurology literature. Here I discuss Alexander Mitscherlich, Haakon Saethre, Walther Spielmeyer, Jules Tinel, and Johannes Pompe. Other neuroscientists had ambivalent roles, including Hans Creutzfeldt, who has been discussed previously. Here, I discuss Max Nonne, Karl Bonhoeffer, and Oswald Bumke. The neuroscientists who resisted had different backgrounds and motivations that likely influenced their behavior, but this group undoubtedly saved lives of colleagues, friends, and patients, or at least prevented forced sterilizations. By recognizing and understanding the actions of these heroes of neuroscience, we pay homage and realize how ethics and morals do not need to be compromised even in dark times.