Kurt Goldstein—the man and his work
pp. 17-29
in: Marianne L. Simmel (ed), The reach of mind, Berlin, Springer, 1968Abstract
The man whose memory we are celebrating made a place for himself in the history of neurology. The history of neurology can be divided into three epochs. At its inception neurology was purely clinical, and the result of a slow process extending over centuries. It was directed towards the isolation and description of great clinical pictures, such as epilepsy, apoplexy, paralysis agitans, etc. ; but it remained a chapter of the general doctrine of diseases which in its turn became internal medicine. The second epoch fell at the end of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century. Neurology at that time was strongly neuro-anatomical and neuropathological. An avenue to a new foundation of neurology on an anatomical basis seemed to be opened by Vesalius in the sixteenth century and certainly by the so-called school of neuropathologists of the eighteenth century. But the establishment of this new foundation suffered a surprising retardation until it became a reality rather suddenly and rapidly in the nineteenth century. The great French clinicians of the 19th century intended no more than to complete the clinical picture by anatomical findings in order to obtain a total picture of a given disease. But at the turn of the century the tendency to interpret, if not to explain, nervous diseases by structural changes became increasingly evident. Anatomy usurped the leading role in the doctrine of diseases which henceforth appeared to be deprived of their dynamics and their chronological features. This view reflected a crude mechanics of a distorted life, leaving room for organized structures but not for organizing principles.
