Pathology of The Nervous System I. [antikvár]

Foreword The publication of a Handbuch is not the creation of a textbook, the reflection of the personal laboratory and literary studies of a single author, but the culmination of the cooperative and intense efforts of many specialists with the support of a liberal publisher. Above all, it needs the guidance of editors who are themselves experts in their special fields and can assemble a competent staff of contributors as well as create order out of the conglomeration of the chapters submitted to them. The raison d'etre, the necessity for an encyclopedic Neuropathology in the English language, has been obvious for many years. The explosive development of neuropathology both in the Western World and in the U.S.S.R. has led to an accumulation of publications which makes it impossible for the individual researcher to keep abreast with progress and compels him to limit the list of references in his publications to the past decade at the most. And this applies to the polyglot only. The individual whose knowledge is confined to his mother tongue is limited to the study of publications in his native language, and an American neuropathologist, e.g., often misses the wealth of the non-English scientific literature. His German colleagues have been in a better position. The older Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten (Encyclopedia of Mental Diseases) included a special volume, Part VII (1,130 pages), The Anatomy of the Psychoses, which was practically a "Handbuch" of neuropathology, edited by W. Spielmeyer in 1930. More recently the voluminous Nervensystem, edited by W. Scholz, was completed. It is Volume XIII of the Handbuch der Speziellen Pathologischen Anatomic und Histologic edited by O. Lubarsch, F. Henke, and R. Roessle and published by Springer Verlag from 1955-1958. It is subdivided into seven separate volumes with a total of more than 9,000 pages. German language dominates the book, although the authors originate in many lands, and a few of the contributions are in French and English. The knowledge of the German language is limited among English-speaking neuropathologists. Let us remember that 298 million people on this earth speak the English language compared with 120 million who speak German. Before World War I there was only limited contact between American and European neu-ropsychiatrists; neuropathology as an independent specialty was practically nonexistent. Among the older generation who initiated the specialty I should like to mention William Gibson Spiller, who studied from 1892-1896 in the laboratories of Dejerine, Edinger, Gowers, Obersteiner, and Oppenheim. Karl T. Neu-buerger in his The History of Neuropathology, adds more examples of this ever-expanding contact between the United States and Europe. Later, in the 1920s, the institutes of Spielmeyer in Munich, of A. Jakob in Hamburg, of Greenfield at Queen Square Hospital in London, of Cajal in Madrid, and of Obersteiner in Vienna were preferred places for the study of neuropathology. Finally, after the end of World War II, an ever-increasing number of young American neuropathologists studied in Western Europe. When they returned home, they became heads of laboratories of neuropathology, affiliated with larger hospitals and departments of medicine of American universities and were, in fact, joined by many emigrating Europeans. These people, in turn, attracted young pathologists and neurologists to an interest in neuropathology. An indicator of the rising interest in neuropathology is the number of members of the American Association of Neuropathologists, which increased from a small original group of about 10 as the club of neuropathologists in 1924 to more than 350 in 1965. With this growing interest in neuropathology, there resulted a large demand for textbooks in English. These include the texts of Biggart, of Bouman and Bok, Buzzard and Greenfield, Courville, Freeman, Hassin, Lichtenstein, Scheinker, and Weil, many of which have been published in several editions. As early as 1932, W. Penfield recognized the difficulty of presenting the whole scope of neuropathology in a textbook written by a single author. He edited his Cytology and Cellular Pathology of the Nervous System in cooperation with a large group of contributors. Greenfield, too, took up this idea of cooperative publication in the first edition of his Neuropathology (1958), which he wrote jointly with Blackwood, Mc-Menemey, A. Meyer, and Norman, and which is now in its second edition with Dorothy Russell as an added contributor. The older textbooks fulfilled their purpose as an introduction to neuropathology for the advanced student, but could not possibly serve as sources of reference for both the research worker and the teacher. The very growth of the literature made them obsolete for such purposes. Now, however, with the advent of Pathology of the Nervous System, in which the contributors number 153 with 41 from outside the United States, the editors and the publisher have taken the bold step of xi