The Brain Masters of Vienna (eBook)

The book comprises biographical notes, of about 1000 words each, with a portrait photo, of 90 influential figures of the famous prewar Viennese school of neuropsychiatry, appearing together for the first time in a single volume. The entries focus on the academic lives and scientific contributions of pioneers in the neurological sciences viewed from a modern perspective. These updated profiles are based on substantial new research. The book includes a wide range of people, some famous Nobel laureates, and others less well known, from the era when Vienna was the epicenter of brain research. Despite the tragic circumstances of two World Wars, these pioneers remained resilient, willing to help others with an admirable dignity against adversity that leaves an indelible lesson to the later generations. Some fell victim of the Holocaust. Others overcame the constraints of National Socialism and ultimately settled overseas to nurture their ambitions and pursue their intellectual goals as physicians, researchers, and teachers. The monograph is a useful source for scholars interested in the evolution of ideas in basic neuroscience, clinical neurology, and neuropsychiatry, and the investigators who effected them.

Lazaros C. Triarhou is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychology of the Aristotelian University Faculty of Philosophy. He holds an M.D. from the Aristotelian University School of Medicine (1981), a M.Sc. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester (1984), a Ph.D. in medical neurobiology from Indiana University-Purdue University (1987), and a postdoctoral diploma in neuropathology from Indiana University (1988). He worked as a visiting scientist in the University of Lund, Sweden, the Preclinical CNS Department of Sandoz in Basel, Switzerland, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Barcelona, Spain. He has served as a faculty member at Indiana University School of Medicine in the United States (1988-2001) and the University of Macedonia School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts in Greece (2001-2021), where he chaired the Department of Educational and Social Policy, and founded and directed the Graduate Program in Neuroscience and Education. He authored Neural transplantation in cerebellar ataxia (Springer, 1997), Dopaminergic neuron transplantation in the weaver mouse model of Parkinson disease (Kluwer Academic, 2002), and ?euromorphology: The fine structure of nervous tissue (Beta Medical Arts, 2017); translated, revised and edited the first English edition of von Economo and Koskinas' Atlas of cytoarchitectonics of the adult human cerebral cortex (Karger, 2008) and a new English edition of von Economo's Cellular structure of the human cerebral cortex (Karger, 2009); and produced Greek translations of books by Albert Schweitzer, Christian de Duve, Fridtjof Nansen, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Gerald M. Edelman, and Bernard Andrieu. For his research in neural transplantation and plasticity he received the Honorable Weil Award of the American Association of Neuropathologists, and the Science Prize of the Bodossakis Foundation. He is the acquisition editor of 'Pioneers in Neurology' for the Journal of Neurology, and associate editor of 'Cerebellar Classics' for The Cerebellum.