Review Neurosciences and History 2016; 4(4): 148-159 The search for the origins of genius in the brain: The Pantheon of Brains E. García-Albea 1, J. García-Albea 2 1Head of department of Neurology. Hospital Universitario Príncipe de Asturias. Senior lecturer, Universidad de Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain. 2Department of Psychiatry. Hospital Clínico Universitario de San Carlos, Madrid, Spain. ABSTRACT The history of the brain has undoubtedly been one of the great challenges of human science, comparable only to understanding of the universe. Both disciplines are still incomplete and their structure and functioning are still unknown. Ever since Hippocrates’ superb explanation in his work on the “sacred disease”, many have been the vicissitudes and confrontations around this angelic yet diabolical viscus. The powers that be have often interfered through the - oretical manipulation. In the early 20th century, at a time when anatomical, physiological, and clinical knowledge were in exponential growth, the cult of the brain reached its zenith (Wilhelm Erb’s “brain-mythology”). In what was then the Soviet Union, the Pantheon of Brains was established to house the brains (“man is his brain”) of the country’s most popular figures. Stalin, responsible for founding the institution, wanted to get ahead of the initiative of collecting brains which was taking place in medical and neurological centres the world over. The Moscow Pantheon is home to the brains of such personalities as Lenin, Eisenstein, Chekhov, and Pavlov. The institution, initially intended to emulate the Pantheon in Paris, deteriorated following the collapse of the Soviet Union; this decline continued until its recent rehabilitation. This brief monograph aims to recount this singular process. KEYWORDS Brain, history, neuropathology, brain collection, phrenology, animal magnetism Introduction the identification of a lesion causing a type of language disorder (Broca). These events have helped accelerate new The history of the brain is undoubtedly exciting, and as contributions, as well as leading to dogmatic setbacks (cra - full of highs and lows, eccentricities, and myths, as the his - nial phrenology, animal magnetism, psychoanalysis, etc.). tory of science itself. This illustrates the extraordinarily However, these many highs and lows have ultimately difficult nature of the brain, the influence of contemporary resulted in significant advances in our understanding of understanding of nature and the supernatural over its this complex anatomical piece. interpretation, and the unavoidable eagerness to speculate about the organ. We should mention that even today, in This paper aims to summarise this singular historical our century, we are yet to develop a full, sufficient expla - period when our knowledge of the brain seemed to have nation of the brain’s functions and how they are per - reached its peak, allowing us finally to resolve its enigmas formed. However, we live today in an “erudite” ignorance, and to understand the reasons residing in the brain for not a base one. The vicissitudes in the advancement of sci - human variability: from the born criminal to the saint, ence from its very early days have legitimated such events from the greedy politician to the genius, able to change as the emergence of Hellenic medicine (Hippocrates) and the course of human history. Corresponding author: Dr Esteban García-Albea Received: 13 January 2017 / Accepted: 18 April 2017 E-mail: [email protected] © 2017 Sociedad Española de Neurología 148 e Pantheon of Brains In the early 20th century, Bekhterev inaugurated a centre We will now turn to Classical Greece and its colonies in which would house the brains of the most prestigious Asia Minor. Significant political and social changes would deceased personalities of the Soviet Union, including Bol - determine a historical shift with huge consequences for shevik-era politicians, scholars, and artists. This Pantheon humanity. From the 5th century BCE (the time of Peri - would try to compete with its namesake in the French cles), the Greeks had the noblest of missions: to take the capital, to become an internationally important institu - “chaos” created by magicians who spurned nature, whose tion, a temple where the neurological bases of talent and immediate empirical observations were distorted by tra - genius would be established: the Pantheon of Brains. dition and superstition, and to transform it into a “cos - mos”: an attempt to discover human nature and add theo - ria (a cause explanation) to autopsia (the act of seeing for Background oneself), allowing the sciences to develop. This is the leap from mythos to logos (Nestlé). We can do away with rigid, In ancient cultures, where reality was impenetrable with - dogmatic explanation and discover the “mysteries” of out religious explanation (demons, gods, the afterlife, evil, nature, including those of man himself (“know thyself”) or natural phenomena such as volcanoes or storms), or even the brain. empirical medical knowledge was relatively advanced: examples are the ancient Egyptian descriptions of cra- Ars medica , the medical vocation ( techne iatriké ), in niovertebral trauma, brain catheterisation, or the pres - which physicians “know the reasons of the things which ence of cerebrospinal fluid (Edwin Smith’s papyrus). 1 Also are done,” in the words of Aristotle, radically rejects any surprising is the widespread use of trepanation (studied magical or religious reference; it focuses on nature, it is in Spain by Campillo, in the context of Balearic Talaiotic rationalised, and for the Greeks, it takes on a form, a full culture) almost throughout antiquity. Something power - intellectual dignity, of its own. A significant achievement. ful was inside that bony structure and had to be taken out; The time of medicine had come: the brain would take the some evil being, as was the case in epileptic or migraine honourable place it deserved, representing a new universe subjects (“ le crâne peruvien ”, Broca, 1867), 2 was torturing for physicians and scholars until the present day. Hip - the patient. The brain, then, was the seat of deities and pocrates selects a very special disease, epilepsy, and writes harpies, or of the great virtues of the individual. We a small treatise, De morbo sacro (Morbus Sacer) , barely 50 should mention the great epidemiologist Carleton Gad - pages long and written in a doctrinal style which is still jusek (1923-2008), who was awarded the Nobel prize in relevant today. This represents for medicine and for sci - 1976. He travelled from Maryland to study kuru, a disease ence in general what the Parthenon does for architecture: which severely affected gait and was spreading through “It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it the villages of New Guinea. The disease was believed to appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred be a hereditary condition, as it occurred in members of than other diseases, but has a natural cause ...” 5 the same family. In a ritual that followed the death of a In this work, he masterfully details the functions of the Papuan warrior, his descendants would remove and eat brain: the brain to inherit the dead warrior’s virtues. But Gad - jusek had a different idea. The disease was in the warrior’s Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain and was transmitted during the ritual. Contraven - brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and ing all international rules, he procured a diseased brain, sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And secreted it in a suitcase and smuggled it to the United by this...we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, States, where he could study it (spongiform encephalopa - what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and thy) and transfer the disease to a chimpanzee (transmis - what unsavory... And by the same organ we become sible encephalopathy). Here, we find two interpretations mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us, of the brain: an ancient one, acclaiming the dignity of the some by night, and some by day, and dreams and brain for holding the virtues of the ancestor, which may untimely wanderings, and cares that are not suitable, be transmitted as spiritual nourishment; and a more and ignorance of present circumstances, desuetude, recent, 20th-century interpretation, according to which and unskilfulness. All these things we endure from the brain, when it is not healthy, but is more hot, the disease was caused by small protein particles with an more cold, more moist, or more dry than natural, or abnormal structure (prions, according to Prusiner) which when it suffers any other preternatural and unusual could develop, fatally, in another brain. 3,4 affection. 5 149 E. García-Albea, J. García-Albea Emotional and cognitive or rational activity, pathology of proposals made by Galen in the second century) and the emotions and of reason, sensory functions (not only located each of them close to a ventricle (the “three brain vision, also discrimination) and mental illness are syste - ventricles”). He also confirms “that Theory of the Laws matically included in this definition. There could be no pertains to the memory; pleading causes and judging better or more succinct way to express it. The humoral or them (which is the practic) to the understanding; and mood theory survived, albeit with substantial modifica - governing of a Commonwealth, to the imagination”. tion, for more than 1500 years; Hippocrates had already In the same way that Hippocrates used his treatise De warned that the path of science is “long and convoluted”, morbo sacro to ask Athenians to ignore the voice of char - 5 and this monograph constitutes proof that he was right. latans, Huarte (from this pragmatic point of view) appeals The Middle Ages represent an important setback to to the princes and the academies of the different king - knowledge of the brain.