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Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: Basic and Clinical Perspectives Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/njhn20
Adolf Beck: A Forgotten Pioneer in Electroencephalography a
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Anton Coenen , Edward Fine & Oksana Zayachkivska
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Department of Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands b
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY c
Department of Physiology, Lviv National Medical University, Lviv, Ukraine Published online: 15 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Anton Coenen, Edward Fine & Oksana Zayachkivska (2014) Adolf Beck: A Forgotten Pioneer in Electroencephalography, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: Basic and Clinical Perspectives, 23:3, 276-286, DOI: 10.1080/0964704X.2013.867600 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0964704X.2013.867600
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Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 23:276–286, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0964-704X print / 1744-5213 online DOI: 10.1080/0964704X.2013.867600
Adolf Beck: A Forgotten Pioneer in Electroencephalography ANTON COENEN,1 EDWARD FINE,2 AND OKSANA ZAYACHKIVSKA3 Downloaded by [University of Auckland Library] at 16:21 13 October 2014
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Department of Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 3 Department of Physiology, Lviv National Medical University, Lviv, Ukraine Adolf Beck, born in 1863 at Cracow (Poland), joined the Department of Physiology of the Jagiellonian University in 1880 to work directly under the supervision of the prominent physiology professor, Napoleon Cybulski. Following his suggestion, Beck started experimental studies on the electrical brain activity of animals, especially in response to sensory stimulation. Beck placed electrodes directly on the surface of brain to localize brain potentials that were evoked by sensory stimuli. He observed spontaneous fluctuations in the electrical brain activity and noted that these oscillations ceased after sensory stimulation. He published these findings concerning the electrical brain activity, such as spontaneous fluctuations, evoked potentials, and desynchronization of brain waves, in 1890 in the German language Centralblatt für Physiologie. Moreover, an intense polemic arose between physiologists of that era on the question of who should claim being the founder of electroencephalography. Ultimately, Richard Caton from Liverpool showed that he had performed similar experiments in monkeys years earlier. Nevertheless, Beck added new elements to the nature of electrical brain activity. In retrospect, next to Richard Caton, Adolf Beck can be regarded, together with Hans Berger who later introduced the method to humans, as one of the founders of electroencephalography. Soon after his success, Beck got a chair at the Department of Physiology of the University at Lemberg, now Lviv National Medical University. Keywords Adolf Beck, electroencephalography, spontaneous oscillations, electrocorticography, evoked potential, desynchronization, Jagiellonian University, University of Lemberg, Napoleon Cybulski, Richard Caton, Hans Berger
Adolf Abraham Beck was born on January 1, 1863, in a Yiddish-speaking family of a Jewish baker in Kraków, at that time a main city in Polish Galicia, the Austrian sector of partitioned Poland. The ancestors of Beck came from a family of diamond cutters that for centuries had lived in Amsterdam. Beck attended the elementary Kraków Jewish School ´ Jacka in and displayed a natural talent for studies. He was admitted to the gymnasium, Sw. Kraków, from which he graduated with distinction in 1884. From 1884 to 1889, he was a student at the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University. He was interested in natural sciences and became an assistant in 1889 of the Address correspondence to Anton Coenen, Department of Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, P. O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
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Figure 1. Adolf Beck (left) and his supervisor Napoleon Cybulski (right) in a photo taken in 1911. Cybulski was a Polish pioneer in neurophysiology and endocrinology and was the discoverer of adrenaline. He also developed a device for measuring blood flow velocity. The photo depicts Beck and Cybulski in writing the textbook Fizjologia człowieka [Human Physiology], published in 1915. This book was for many decades the standard teaching text for medical students at Polish universities. ©National Museum Cracow. Reproduced by permission of National Museum Cracow. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
famous physiologist Napoleon Nikodem Cybulski (1854–1919; see Fig. 1). Beck was fascinated with the study of electrophysiology of the nervous system, and particularly in the electrical response of a nerve evoked by sensory stimulation. This research project was suggested to him by Cybulski since a popular topic at that time was the excitability of a nerve at all points over its pathway. Based on the fact that the activity travels along the nerve, the German Eduard Pflüger (1859) proposed that neural excitation gathers strength in its passage down the nerve. This “avalanche theory” states that conduction depends not simply upon a wave-like movement pattern propagating itself but also upon a gradual increment of the potential energy in the nerve over its entire pathway. Beck initially measured the excitability at two points of the spinal cord in frogs following stimulation of their sciatic nerves. He used nonpolarizable clay electrodes as described by du BoisReymond, which were connected by zinc wires to a Wiedemann mirror galvanometer. The mirror could reflect a light beam to a read-out scale. One electrode was placed on a point of the spinal cord and the other over the cerebral hemispheres. It appeared that an electronegative variation appeared on the cerebral cortex following stimulation of the spinal cord. This result was explained by the observation that the spontaneous current in the cerebral cortex was constantly fluctuating, while the evoked activity came on top of these oscillations. These findings led in 1888 to a publication by Beck in the Polish language, translated into English as, On the Excitability of Various Parts of the Same Nerve. Beck presented his recordings in his first student conference that year and gained a prize from the university. One year later, he was appointed graduate student in the Department of Physiology. There he began his extensive research to the electrical processes of the brain, which became the
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main topic of Beck’s doctorate work. The oscillations that Beck and Cybulski saw in the fluctuating baseline brought them to the idea of continuous recording of spontaneous electrical brain activity. Beck graduated as an MD, cum laude, on the basis of this research in 1890. Beck’s dissertation appeared in 1891. One year earlier, Beck published a short paper of his work in the leading European physiology journal Centralblatt für Physiologie (Beck, 1890a). This paper was entitled “Die Bestimmung der Localisation der Gehirn- und Rückenmarksfunctionen vermittelst der electrischen Erscheinungen” [The determination of localizations in the brain and spinal cord with the aid of electrical phenomena].
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Highlights of Beck’s Brain Recordings The 1890 publication of Beck was the overture to a most exciting period in the history of electroencephalography. The paper attracted enormous attention. Adolf Beck, a graduate student of the physiologist Napoleon Cybulski, described the spontaneous and evoked electrical activities in the brain of dogs and rabbits. Beck determined the posterior cortical areas reacting on visual stimulation by the light of a magnesium flare, determined the more anterior located cortical areas reacting on auditory stimulation by hand claps and determined the cortical areas reacting on electrical stimulation of various regions of the skin. Beck could also show that sensory areas were not sharply demarcated but showed some overlap. Beck’s publication with Cybulski showed that occurrence of an active state expressed in electronegativity in a cortical area was accompanied simultaneously by electropositivity in contralateral homologous places (Beck & Cybulski, 1896). With this method of recording electrical brain activity, the young Polish physiologist was able to localize various sensory areas of the cerebral cortex that reacted with electronegativity upon stimulation. In doing this, Beck discovered not only the evoked responses but also the spontaneous fluctuations of the brain potentials. He further showed that these oscillations were genuine electrical brain activities by proving that these fluctuations were not related to heart and breathing rhythms. Moreover, Beck observed the decrease in the amplitude of these potentials upon sensory stimulation. He observed a cessation in the fluctuations of the electrical waves as a consequence of afferent stimulation either by electrical stimulation of the sciatic nerve or by peripheral stimulation of the eyes of the experimental animal with light flashes. Beck believed not only that he was the first to describe “evoked potentials” but also that he was the first to describe the desynchronization in the electroencephalogram following stimulation (Coenen, Zayachkivsky, & Bilski, 1998; see Fig. 2). Beck claimed to be the discoverer of the electrical brain activity that is now known as the electroencephalogram, or more precisely the electrocorticogram, since he recorded directly from the exposed cerebral cortex of animals.
Claims on the Discovery of Electrical Brain Activity Beck’s publication aroused extraordinary controversy in the world of physiology. A spate of claims followed for priority of discovering the electrical activity of the brain. The first salient comment was from Ernst Fleischl von Marxow (1890), a prominent physiology professor at the University of Vienna. He wrote that he had already, seven years earlier, deposited a sealed letter at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, containing claims that he had recorded electrical brain activity in 1883. Examination of the contents of the sealed letter revealed that Fleischl had indeed recorded electrical activity from animals’ brains. Beck responded laconically: “Nature held and still holds innumerable riddles
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Figure 2. This is the filtered and plotted reproduction of the experiment that Beck described in his thesis, in the English version on page 33 (Beck, 1973). The registration shows three essential elements: the spontaneous oscillations, the evoked potential after a flash of light, and the desynchronization both after the visual stimulus and the hand clap. Due to the placement of electrodes on the posterior cortex, the flash gives an evoked response and the clap only a desynchronization. ©Radboud University Nijmegen. Reproduced by permission of Radboud University Nijmegen. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
under the seal of secrecy. It makes no difference for science whether these riddles are kept under the seal of Nature herself or under that of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna” (Beck, 1890b, p. 572). Another remarkable response came from Vasiliy Y. Danilevsky, a scientist working at the University of Kharkov in the Ukraine. In his letter to the Centralblatt, Danilevsky mentioned his doctoral thesis Investigations in the Physiology of the Brain, written in the Russian language (Danilevsky, 1891). In this thesis, he observed electrical activity of a dog’s brain and gave a description of the fluctuating brain potentials that he had registered with nonpolarizable electrodes and a self-designed mirror galvanometer. He mentioned briefly desynchronization of cortical potentials after electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves. Unfortunately, Danilevsky published in the Centralblatt a summary of his thesis in response to Beck but not earlier than 1891. In this respect, Danilevsky was too late to claim priority, although his research was qualitatively and quantitatively comparable to Beck’s work. The discussion concerning the claim on the discovery of the electrical brain activity was abruptly ended by a letter of Richard Caton of the School of Medicine in Liverpool in England (Caton, 1891). Caton, a medical physiologist, referred to a brief abstract of about 10 sentences, which he had published 15 years earlier in 1875. In this abstract titled, “The Electric Currents of the Brain,” which appeared in the British Medical Journal, Caton described the spontaneous waxing and waning of the electrical activity recorded from the exposed brain of rabbits and monkeys with a Thompson galvanometer and nonpolarizable clay electrodes. He mapped discrete brain areas that responded to specific peripheral stimuli. The abstract appeared on the occasion of a meeting of the British Medical Association in February 1875. Some years later, Caton described more extensively identical experiments with a larger number of animals, almost with the same results (Caton, 1877, 1887). Caton’s claim was convincing and indisputable and nowadays it is generally accepted that his abstract of 1875 contained the first description of the electroencephalogram (Fine & Fine, 2012). Regrettably for Caton was that his findings “produced no single ripple in the pool of physiologists.” Later Caton resigned from physiology and became the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. His family and colleagues were unaware of his discovery, since he took deliberate steps to hide the fact that he had worked on the brain of conscious animals. Beck was, as most physiologists, not aware of Caton’s work, but he explored the electrical brain activity much more extensively and detailed than Caton did. Beck delivered important contributions to the nature of electrical brain activity. He accurately described
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Figure 3. The three founders of electroencephalography: at left the Englishman Richard Caton (1842–1926; ©London: Pitman) from Liverpool, in the middle the Pole Adolf Beck (1863–1942; ©University of Lviv) from Kraków, and at right the German Hans Berger (1873–1941; ©Stuttgart: Thieme) from Jena. Reproduced by permission of rightsholders. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholders. (Color figure available online.)
the localization of sensory modalities in the cerebral cortex by electrical and sensory stimulation and by recording electrical activities. The paper he sent to the Centralblatt in 1890 was a summary of his extensive thesis that was published one year later in the Polish language. Nevertheless, interest in his electrical brain work was limited until the initial publication of Hans Berger from the University Clinic at Jena in Germany in 1929 (Berger, 1929, 1969). Berger recorded for the first time the electrical activity of the human brain from the intact scalp and refined the noninvasive recording technique of cerebral electrical activity from animals to humans. He showed that this method could be a basic tool for clinical examination of the brain in health and disease. This was the reason that Berger was honored as the father of electroencephalography; however, credit must also be directed to the two earlier discoverers: Richard Caton with his first note of 1875 and Adolf Beck with his publication in 1890. In looking back, the discovery of electroencephalography could best be attributed to the trio of Caton, for his first brief description of brain waves, of Beck, for his extensive brain work in animals, and of Berger, for recording the electroencephalogram of humans (see Fig. 3; Coenen et al., 2013). In an attempt to make Beck’s work more accessible to contemporary scientists, the Polish thesis was translated into English in 1973 at the initiative of Mary Brazier, who also wrote papers about the scientific significance of Beck (Brazier, 1959, 1988).
Beck Appointed to Professor in Lemberg It is important to mention that the scientific activity of Beck was not limited to electrophysiology. Beck’s scientific interest was wide-ranging, and he extended his research to other fields, such as general and visceral physiology. In 1894, Beck got his “venia legend” (habilitation) in physiology with a thesis titled On Variations in Venous Pressure (Beck, 1895). Cybulski, initially Beck’s supervisor and professor but later a colleague and friend, realized that their electrophysiological work had opened a new field of research and began to equip his laboratory more effectively for such studies. Cybulski and Beck were able to pursue their electrophysiological studies and extended the work of brain potentials from rabbits and dogs to monkeys. This formed the subject of a report they made for the Third
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International Physiological Congress in Berne (Switzerland) in 1895. This was their last experimental collaboration. Beck was offered a professorship at the University of Lemberg. At that time, Lemberg, a twin city of Kraków, was the capital of Galicia. After the fall of the Habsburg empire, Lemberg came under Polish rule and renamed as Lwów. Following the end of the Second World War, it belonged to the Soviet Union with the name Lviv. Presently, Lviv is a city in the west of the Ukraine. In May 1895, at the age of 32, Beck accepted an offer to be appointed professor in physiology at the University of Lemberg (see Fig. 4). He worked there until 1935 and spent the rest of his life in this city. Beck started with energy and enthusiasm building up the new Department of Physiology under the Medical Faculty. Beck organized in Lemberg an electrophysiological laboratory equipped with the newest galvanometers and recording devices. Besides an emphasis in electrophysiology and neuroscience, Beck’s interest spread also to other aspects of physiology. In his role as teacher and researcher, Beck created the famous School of Physiology at the University of Lemberg, which delivered various prominent physiologists (Zayachkivska, Gzegotsky, & Coenen, 2012). Beck’s research on the electrical potentials of the brain did not cease but was extended, including the location of the sensation of pain by recording the electrical responses to pain stimuli and the application of lesion techniques. In a paper, published in 1905, Beck pointed out that
Figure 4. Beck in 1905 as the Dean of the Medical Faculty of the University of Lemberg. Beck served his university as Dean in 1904/1905 and in 1916/1917 and as Rector in the period of 1912/1913 and 1914/1915. The latter period was interrupted by his arrest by the Russian army. ©University of Lviv. Reproduced by permission of University of Lviv. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
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Figure 5. The first photograph of an epileptic seizure recorded in the cerebral cortex of a dog. The spontaneous oscillations in the bottom trace have a frequency of approximately 3 Hz. The recording is made by Cybulski and Jele´nska-Macieszyna (1914). ©Jagiellonian University Cracow. Reproduced by permission of Jagiellonian University Cracow. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
places in the cerebral cortex were evidently associated with pain sensations. Beck and his colleague Gustav Bikeles (1861–1918; Beck & Bikeles, 1911) investigated the electrical activities of the cerebellum to investigate its putative sensory functions. However, the findings of general, nonspecific reactions to various forms of sensory stimulations brought them to a negative conclusion. In the academic year 1898–1899, Beck went to the Zoological Station in Naples, where he became interested in electrical phenomena of the retina. These electric potential of the retina in response to light were already described, but it was unclear which layers in the retina contained the source of the electrical currents (Dewar, 1877). Beck was able to demonstrate that the layer of light-sensitive rods and cones evidently generates electrical phenomena. He recorded electrical currents in the eye of the cephalopod, Eledone moschata, whose retina is formed by one layer of rods and cones (Beck, 1899). Collaborating with Cybulski and a Kraków colleague, Sabina Jele´nska-Macieszyna, Beck continued common electrophysiological work. The group published one of the first photographs of electroencephalographic potentials and even succeeded in photographing the tracings of a dog showing an epileptic seizure (see Fig. 5). The very first registration of the electrical brain activity, however, was made in 1913 by Vladimir Práwdicz-Neminski, who worked at the Kiev University of St. Vladimir and later at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Nemminski, 1913, p. 952). This researcher, identified also the two-pattern rhythms in the electrical activity of dogs, initially denoted as “waves of the first order” and “waves of the second order,” later called A-waves and Bwaves, and now called alpha waves and beta waves. He also coined the German term “elektrocerebrogramm” to describe the electrical activity of the brain (Práwdicz-Neminski, 1925). Berger changed this word to “elektrenkephalogramm,” which term was translated into English as “electroencephalogram” and abbreviated as “EEG.” The electrophysiological investigations of so many groups in East Europe at that time with Poland (Cybulski and Jele´nska-Macieszyna; Beck and Bikeles), Russia (Danilevsky), and the Ukraine (PráwdiczNeminski) showed the superiority of that type of research in that part of Europe. This research was terminated when the Soviet regime ended electrophysiological research, since the communist regime enforced Pavlovian concepts, which were allied closely to its dogma.
World War I and Russian Occupation Interrupted Beck’s Research All activities of Beck were abruptly interrupted in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Lemberg was taken by the Russians in their advance against the Habsburg state. Beck who was for the second time asked to act as the Rector of the university in 1914/1915 fell
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into an extraordinary situation. Regardless of his prominence as a renowned scientist and as rector, he was arrested by the Russian army on June 19, 1915. Together with other Lemberg dignitaries, he was imprisoned in living barracks in Kiev. In 1916, he was released by the intervention of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1935), the famous Russian physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate and a friend of Napoleon Cybulski. After months of wandering through Russia and Sweden, Beck was able to return to Lemberg. In 1935, he authored a memoir on the adverse days of the First World War, which became an accurate and detailed documentary of the events that took place at the university (Beck, 1935). In the year 1919, a great year because Poland became an independent nation, Beck lost his friend Napoleon Cybulski. In a moving eulogy of his old teacher, Beck paid tribute to him as a scientist, a colleague, a friend of the university, and a great human being. Beck retired at an age of 67, with the title “Professor honoris causa,” one of his many distinctions. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków, the Academy of Medical Science in Warsaw, as well the Polish Academy of Sciences. Beck produced 180 publications and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physiology, in 1905, then in 1908, and finally in 1911, but he never received this high honor.
The Tragedy after so Long Life During the Second World War, life became even more troubled and dangerous for Beck than in the First World War. The city was occupied by the Nazis and Beck, who was of Jewish origin, remained in the town and suffered many humiliations. But instead of going into hiding, he chose to stay in his home in the shadow of the university to which he had given so many years of his life. But it became too risky, since many Jews were already murdered in the Janowska and Bełz˙ ec concentration camps, and several Lwów professors were killed on the Wuleckie Hills. The physiologist and medical doctor Zdzisław Bielinski, the successor of Beck in the Department of Physiology, started to take care of his old teacher. Together with Beck’s son Henryk, they found a hiding place for him. Just before his eightieth birthday, Beck became unwell and Henryk and Bielinski brought him to the hospital. But Beck was betrayed and at the last moment Henryk handed his father a capsule with cyanide to commit suicide before the Nazis could send him to the gas chambers. In the chaos, it is not known which day he committed suicide in August 1942, where his grave site is, or even if he were buried. Despite the tragedies in the Beck family, Beck’s suicide and the execution in Palmiry of Kazimierz Zakrzewski, the husband of Beck’s daughter Jadwiga, Beck’s son Henryk, born in 1896, a gynecologist and a unique, artistic talented person joined the Warsaw Uprising (see Fig. 6). Henryk Beck, who had previously served in the Polish army, became one of the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising. After the final capitulation in 1944, he went into hiding in the ruins of Warsaw and became one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. The life in the cellars, in suffocating air, heat, and darkness, while continuously under extreme danger, was a genuine torture. Yet, Henryk Beck provided medical assistance to the wounded and, moreover, with his artistic talents he managed to create a series of documentary drawings and watercolors about the war, his life, and his family in this situation (Jaworska, 1982; Zayachkivska, 2013). Henryk Beck survived the occupation and, in 1946, he got a chair in obstetrics in Wrocław, the former Breslau. After some months later he died of heart failure, undoubtedly following his sufferings during war time. Beck’s daughter Jadwiga Beck Zakrzewska was the only member of the Beck family who survived. In Supplement 3 of the Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis of 1973, with the translation of Beck’s dissertation,
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Figure 6. One of the last photographs of Beck made in 1938, together with his son Henryk, in his house in Warsaw. ©University of Lviv. Reproduced by permission of University of Lviv. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
Jadwiga writes in A Daughter’s Memories of Adolf Beck her father’s death as the following: “His death was painfully tragic; in 1942 in Lwów, when this magnificent, strong man had reached the age of 80, after a beautiful and dedicated life, he took poison at the moment when the Germans came for him” (Beck Zakrzewska, 1973, p. 59). After the war, Jadwiga found in the remains of her burned house in ruined Warsaw, Beck’s ring, which was presented to him to regard his exceptional service to the Medical Faculty of the University of Lemberg/Lwów. The inscription “Bene merenti facultas medica” on the ring remembering Beck’s great merits was still legible.
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Práwdicz-Neminski WW (1925): Zur Kenntnis der elektrischen und der Innervationsvorgänge in den funktionellen Elementen und Geweben des tierischen Organismus: Elektrocerebrogramm der Säugetiere. Pflügers Archiv für die gesamte Physiologie 209: 362–382. Zayachkivska O (2013): The World of Adolf Beck By Eyes of Henryk Beck. Lviv, Bak. Zayachkivska O, Gzegotsky M, Coenen A (2012): Impact on electroencephalography of Adolf Beck, a prominent Polish scientist and founder of the Lviv School of Physiology. International Journal of Psychophysiology 85: 3–6.
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: Basic and Clinical Perspectives Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/njhn20
Adolf Beck: A Forgotten Pioneer in Electroencephalography a
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Anton Coenen , Edward Fine & Oksana Zayachkivska
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Department of Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands b
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY c
Department of Physiology, Lviv National Medical University, Lviv, Ukraine Published online: 15 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Anton Coenen, Edward Fine & Oksana Zayachkivska (2014) Adolf Beck: A Forgotten Pioneer in Electroencephalography, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: Basic and Clinical Perspectives, 23:3, 276-286, DOI: 10.1080/0964704X.2013.867600 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0964704X.2013.867600
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Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 23:276–286, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0964-704X print / 1744-5213 online DOI: 10.1080/0964704X.2013.867600
Adolf Beck: A Forgotten Pioneer in Electroencephalography ANTON COENEN,1 EDWARD FINE,2 AND OKSANA ZAYACHKIVSKA3 Downloaded by [University of Auckland Library] at 16:21 13 October 2014
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Department of Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 3 Department of Physiology, Lviv National Medical University, Lviv, Ukraine Adolf Beck, born in 1863 at Cracow (Poland), joined the Department of Physiology of the Jagiellonian University in 1880 to work directly under the supervision of the prominent physiology professor, Napoleon Cybulski. Following his suggestion, Beck started experimental studies on the electrical brain activity of animals, especially in response to sensory stimulation. Beck placed electrodes directly on the surface of brain to localize brain potentials that were evoked by sensory stimuli. He observed spontaneous fluctuations in the electrical brain activity and noted that these oscillations ceased after sensory stimulation. He published these findings concerning the electrical brain activity, such as spontaneous fluctuations, evoked potentials, and desynchronization of brain waves, in 1890 in the German language Centralblatt für Physiologie. Moreover, an intense polemic arose between physiologists of that era on the question of who should claim being the founder of electroencephalography. Ultimately, Richard Caton from Liverpool showed that he had performed similar experiments in monkeys years earlier. Nevertheless, Beck added new elements to the nature of electrical brain activity. In retrospect, next to Richard Caton, Adolf Beck can be regarded, together with Hans Berger who later introduced the method to humans, as one of the founders of electroencephalography. Soon after his success, Beck got a chair at the Department of Physiology of the University at Lemberg, now Lviv National Medical University. Keywords Adolf Beck, electroencephalography, spontaneous oscillations, electrocorticography, evoked potential, desynchronization, Jagiellonian University, University of Lemberg, Napoleon Cybulski, Richard Caton, Hans Berger
Adolf Abraham Beck was born on January 1, 1863, in a Yiddish-speaking family of a Jewish baker in Kraków, at that time a main city in Polish Galicia, the Austrian sector of partitioned Poland. The ancestors of Beck came from a family of diamond cutters that for centuries had lived in Amsterdam. Beck attended the elementary Kraków Jewish School ´ Jacka in and displayed a natural talent for studies. He was admitted to the gymnasium, Sw. Kraków, from which he graduated with distinction in 1884. From 1884 to 1889, he was a student at the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University. He was interested in natural sciences and became an assistant in 1889 of the Address correspondence to Anton Coenen, Department of Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, P. O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
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Figure 1. Adolf Beck (left) and his supervisor Napoleon Cybulski (right) in a photo taken in 1911. Cybulski was a Polish pioneer in neurophysiology and endocrinology and was the discoverer of adrenaline. He also developed a device for measuring blood flow velocity. The photo depicts Beck and Cybulski in writing the textbook Fizjologia człowieka [Human Physiology], published in 1915. This book was for many decades the standard teaching text for medical students at Polish universities. ©National Museum Cracow. Reproduced by permission of National Museum Cracow. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
famous physiologist Napoleon Nikodem Cybulski (1854–1919; see Fig. 1). Beck was fascinated with the study of electrophysiology of the nervous system, and particularly in the electrical response of a nerve evoked by sensory stimulation. This research project was suggested to him by Cybulski since a popular topic at that time was the excitability of a nerve at all points over its pathway. Based on the fact that the activity travels along the nerve, the German Eduard Pflüger (1859) proposed that neural excitation gathers strength in its passage down the nerve. This “avalanche theory” states that conduction depends not simply upon a wave-like movement pattern propagating itself but also upon a gradual increment of the potential energy in the nerve over its entire pathway. Beck initially measured the excitability at two points of the spinal cord in frogs following stimulation of their sciatic nerves. He used nonpolarizable clay electrodes as described by du BoisReymond, which were connected by zinc wires to a Wiedemann mirror galvanometer. The mirror could reflect a light beam to a read-out scale. One electrode was placed on a point of the spinal cord and the other over the cerebral hemispheres. It appeared that an electronegative variation appeared on the cerebral cortex following stimulation of the spinal cord. This result was explained by the observation that the spontaneous current in the cerebral cortex was constantly fluctuating, while the evoked activity came on top of these oscillations. These findings led in 1888 to a publication by Beck in the Polish language, translated into English as, On the Excitability of Various Parts of the Same Nerve. Beck presented his recordings in his first student conference that year and gained a prize from the university. One year later, he was appointed graduate student in the Department of Physiology. There he began his extensive research to the electrical processes of the brain, which became the
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main topic of Beck’s doctorate work. The oscillations that Beck and Cybulski saw in the fluctuating baseline brought them to the idea of continuous recording of spontaneous electrical brain activity. Beck graduated as an MD, cum laude, on the basis of this research in 1890. Beck’s dissertation appeared in 1891. One year earlier, Beck published a short paper of his work in the leading European physiology journal Centralblatt für Physiologie (Beck, 1890a). This paper was entitled “Die Bestimmung der Localisation der Gehirn- und Rückenmarksfunctionen vermittelst der electrischen Erscheinungen” [The determination of localizations in the brain and spinal cord with the aid of electrical phenomena].
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Highlights of Beck’s Brain Recordings The 1890 publication of Beck was the overture to a most exciting period in the history of electroencephalography. The paper attracted enormous attention. Adolf Beck, a graduate student of the physiologist Napoleon Cybulski, described the spontaneous and evoked electrical activities in the brain of dogs and rabbits. Beck determined the posterior cortical areas reacting on visual stimulation by the light of a magnesium flare, determined the more anterior located cortical areas reacting on auditory stimulation by hand claps and determined the cortical areas reacting on electrical stimulation of various regions of the skin. Beck could also show that sensory areas were not sharply demarcated but showed some overlap. Beck’s publication with Cybulski showed that occurrence of an active state expressed in electronegativity in a cortical area was accompanied simultaneously by electropositivity in contralateral homologous places (Beck & Cybulski, 1896). With this method of recording electrical brain activity, the young Polish physiologist was able to localize various sensory areas of the cerebral cortex that reacted with electronegativity upon stimulation. In doing this, Beck discovered not only the evoked responses but also the spontaneous fluctuations of the brain potentials. He further showed that these oscillations were genuine electrical brain activities by proving that these fluctuations were not related to heart and breathing rhythms. Moreover, Beck observed the decrease in the amplitude of these potentials upon sensory stimulation. He observed a cessation in the fluctuations of the electrical waves as a consequence of afferent stimulation either by electrical stimulation of the sciatic nerve or by peripheral stimulation of the eyes of the experimental animal with light flashes. Beck believed not only that he was the first to describe “evoked potentials” but also that he was the first to describe the desynchronization in the electroencephalogram following stimulation (Coenen, Zayachkivsky, & Bilski, 1998; see Fig. 2). Beck claimed to be the discoverer of the electrical brain activity that is now known as the electroencephalogram, or more precisely the electrocorticogram, since he recorded directly from the exposed cerebral cortex of animals.
Claims on the Discovery of Electrical Brain Activity Beck’s publication aroused extraordinary controversy in the world of physiology. A spate of claims followed for priority of discovering the electrical activity of the brain. The first salient comment was from Ernst Fleischl von Marxow (1890), a prominent physiology professor at the University of Vienna. He wrote that he had already, seven years earlier, deposited a sealed letter at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, containing claims that he had recorded electrical brain activity in 1883. Examination of the contents of the sealed letter revealed that Fleischl had indeed recorded electrical activity from animals’ brains. Beck responded laconically: “Nature held and still holds innumerable riddles
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Figure 2. This is the filtered and plotted reproduction of the experiment that Beck described in his thesis, in the English version on page 33 (Beck, 1973). The registration shows three essential elements: the spontaneous oscillations, the evoked potential after a flash of light, and the desynchronization both after the visual stimulus and the hand clap. Due to the placement of electrodes on the posterior cortex, the flash gives an evoked response and the clap only a desynchronization. ©Radboud University Nijmegen. Reproduced by permission of Radboud University Nijmegen. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
under the seal of secrecy. It makes no difference for science whether these riddles are kept under the seal of Nature herself or under that of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna” (Beck, 1890b, p. 572). Another remarkable response came from Vasiliy Y. Danilevsky, a scientist working at the University of Kharkov in the Ukraine. In his letter to the Centralblatt, Danilevsky mentioned his doctoral thesis Investigations in the Physiology of the Brain, written in the Russian language (Danilevsky, 1891). In this thesis, he observed electrical activity of a dog’s brain and gave a description of the fluctuating brain potentials that he had registered with nonpolarizable electrodes and a self-designed mirror galvanometer. He mentioned briefly desynchronization of cortical potentials after electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves. Unfortunately, Danilevsky published in the Centralblatt a summary of his thesis in response to Beck but not earlier than 1891. In this respect, Danilevsky was too late to claim priority, although his research was qualitatively and quantitatively comparable to Beck’s work. The discussion concerning the claim on the discovery of the electrical brain activity was abruptly ended by a letter of Richard Caton of the School of Medicine in Liverpool in England (Caton, 1891). Caton, a medical physiologist, referred to a brief abstract of about 10 sentences, which he had published 15 years earlier in 1875. In this abstract titled, “The Electric Currents of the Brain,” which appeared in the British Medical Journal, Caton described the spontaneous waxing and waning of the electrical activity recorded from the exposed brain of rabbits and monkeys with a Thompson galvanometer and nonpolarizable clay electrodes. He mapped discrete brain areas that responded to specific peripheral stimuli. The abstract appeared on the occasion of a meeting of the British Medical Association in February 1875. Some years later, Caton described more extensively identical experiments with a larger number of animals, almost with the same results (Caton, 1877, 1887). Caton’s claim was convincing and indisputable and nowadays it is generally accepted that his abstract of 1875 contained the first description of the electroencephalogram (Fine & Fine, 2012). Regrettably for Caton was that his findings “produced no single ripple in the pool of physiologists.” Later Caton resigned from physiology and became the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. His family and colleagues were unaware of his discovery, since he took deliberate steps to hide the fact that he had worked on the brain of conscious animals. Beck was, as most physiologists, not aware of Caton’s work, but he explored the electrical brain activity much more extensively and detailed than Caton did. Beck delivered important contributions to the nature of electrical brain activity. He accurately described
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Figure 3. The three founders of electroencephalography: at left the Englishman Richard Caton (1842–1926; ©London: Pitman) from Liverpool, in the middle the Pole Adolf Beck (1863–1942; ©University of Lviv) from Kraków, and at right the German Hans Berger (1873–1941; ©Stuttgart: Thieme) from Jena. Reproduced by permission of rightsholders. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholders. (Color figure available online.)
the localization of sensory modalities in the cerebral cortex by electrical and sensory stimulation and by recording electrical activities. The paper he sent to the Centralblatt in 1890 was a summary of his extensive thesis that was published one year later in the Polish language. Nevertheless, interest in his electrical brain work was limited until the initial publication of Hans Berger from the University Clinic at Jena in Germany in 1929 (Berger, 1929, 1969). Berger recorded for the first time the electrical activity of the human brain from the intact scalp and refined the noninvasive recording technique of cerebral electrical activity from animals to humans. He showed that this method could be a basic tool for clinical examination of the brain in health and disease. This was the reason that Berger was honored as the father of electroencephalography; however, credit must also be directed to the two earlier discoverers: Richard Caton with his first note of 1875 and Adolf Beck with his publication in 1890. In looking back, the discovery of electroencephalography could best be attributed to the trio of Caton, for his first brief description of brain waves, of Beck, for his extensive brain work in animals, and of Berger, for recording the electroencephalogram of humans (see Fig. 3; Coenen et al., 2013). In an attempt to make Beck’s work more accessible to contemporary scientists, the Polish thesis was translated into English in 1973 at the initiative of Mary Brazier, who also wrote papers about the scientific significance of Beck (Brazier, 1959, 1988).
Beck Appointed to Professor in Lemberg It is important to mention that the scientific activity of Beck was not limited to electrophysiology. Beck’s scientific interest was wide-ranging, and he extended his research to other fields, such as general and visceral physiology. In 1894, Beck got his “venia legend” (habilitation) in physiology with a thesis titled On Variations in Venous Pressure (Beck, 1895). Cybulski, initially Beck’s supervisor and professor but later a colleague and friend, realized that their electrophysiological work had opened a new field of research and began to equip his laboratory more effectively for such studies. Cybulski and Beck were able to pursue their electrophysiological studies and extended the work of brain potentials from rabbits and dogs to monkeys. This formed the subject of a report they made for the Third
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International Physiological Congress in Berne (Switzerland) in 1895. This was their last experimental collaboration. Beck was offered a professorship at the University of Lemberg. At that time, Lemberg, a twin city of Kraków, was the capital of Galicia. After the fall of the Habsburg empire, Lemberg came under Polish rule and renamed as Lwów. Following the end of the Second World War, it belonged to the Soviet Union with the name Lviv. Presently, Lviv is a city in the west of the Ukraine. In May 1895, at the age of 32, Beck accepted an offer to be appointed professor in physiology at the University of Lemberg (see Fig. 4). He worked there until 1935 and spent the rest of his life in this city. Beck started with energy and enthusiasm building up the new Department of Physiology under the Medical Faculty. Beck organized in Lemberg an electrophysiological laboratory equipped with the newest galvanometers and recording devices. Besides an emphasis in electrophysiology and neuroscience, Beck’s interest spread also to other aspects of physiology. In his role as teacher and researcher, Beck created the famous School of Physiology at the University of Lemberg, which delivered various prominent physiologists (Zayachkivska, Gzegotsky, & Coenen, 2012). Beck’s research on the electrical potentials of the brain did not cease but was extended, including the location of the sensation of pain by recording the electrical responses to pain stimuli and the application of lesion techniques. In a paper, published in 1905, Beck pointed out that
Figure 4. Beck in 1905 as the Dean of the Medical Faculty of the University of Lemberg. Beck served his university as Dean in 1904/1905 and in 1916/1917 and as Rector in the period of 1912/1913 and 1914/1915. The latter period was interrupted by his arrest by the Russian army. ©University of Lviv. Reproduced by permission of University of Lviv. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
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Figure 5. The first photograph of an epileptic seizure recorded in the cerebral cortex of a dog. The spontaneous oscillations in the bottom trace have a frequency of approximately 3 Hz. The recording is made by Cybulski and Jele´nska-Macieszyna (1914). ©Jagiellonian University Cracow. Reproduced by permission of Jagiellonian University Cracow. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
places in the cerebral cortex were evidently associated with pain sensations. Beck and his colleague Gustav Bikeles (1861–1918; Beck & Bikeles, 1911) investigated the electrical activities of the cerebellum to investigate its putative sensory functions. However, the findings of general, nonspecific reactions to various forms of sensory stimulations brought them to a negative conclusion. In the academic year 1898–1899, Beck went to the Zoological Station in Naples, where he became interested in electrical phenomena of the retina. These electric potential of the retina in response to light were already described, but it was unclear which layers in the retina contained the source of the electrical currents (Dewar, 1877). Beck was able to demonstrate that the layer of light-sensitive rods and cones evidently generates electrical phenomena. He recorded electrical currents in the eye of the cephalopod, Eledone moschata, whose retina is formed by one layer of rods and cones (Beck, 1899). Collaborating with Cybulski and a Kraków colleague, Sabina Jele´nska-Macieszyna, Beck continued common electrophysiological work. The group published one of the first photographs of electroencephalographic potentials and even succeeded in photographing the tracings of a dog showing an epileptic seizure (see Fig. 5). The very first registration of the electrical brain activity, however, was made in 1913 by Vladimir Práwdicz-Neminski, who worked at the Kiev University of St. Vladimir and later at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Nemminski, 1913, p. 952). This researcher, identified also the two-pattern rhythms in the electrical activity of dogs, initially denoted as “waves of the first order” and “waves of the second order,” later called A-waves and Bwaves, and now called alpha waves and beta waves. He also coined the German term “elektrocerebrogramm” to describe the electrical activity of the brain (Práwdicz-Neminski, 1925). Berger changed this word to “elektrenkephalogramm,” which term was translated into English as “electroencephalogram” and abbreviated as “EEG.” The electrophysiological investigations of so many groups in East Europe at that time with Poland (Cybulski and Jele´nska-Macieszyna; Beck and Bikeles), Russia (Danilevsky), and the Ukraine (PráwdiczNeminski) showed the superiority of that type of research in that part of Europe. This research was terminated when the Soviet regime ended electrophysiological research, since the communist regime enforced Pavlovian concepts, which were allied closely to its dogma.
World War I and Russian Occupation Interrupted Beck’s Research All activities of Beck were abruptly interrupted in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Lemberg was taken by the Russians in their advance against the Habsburg state. Beck who was for the second time asked to act as the Rector of the university in 1914/1915 fell
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into an extraordinary situation. Regardless of his prominence as a renowned scientist and as rector, he was arrested by the Russian army on June 19, 1915. Together with other Lemberg dignitaries, he was imprisoned in living barracks in Kiev. In 1916, he was released by the intervention of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1935), the famous Russian physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate and a friend of Napoleon Cybulski. After months of wandering through Russia and Sweden, Beck was able to return to Lemberg. In 1935, he authored a memoir on the adverse days of the First World War, which became an accurate and detailed documentary of the events that took place at the university (Beck, 1935). In the year 1919, a great year because Poland became an independent nation, Beck lost his friend Napoleon Cybulski. In a moving eulogy of his old teacher, Beck paid tribute to him as a scientist, a colleague, a friend of the university, and a great human being. Beck retired at an age of 67, with the title “Professor honoris causa,” one of his many distinctions. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków, the Academy of Medical Science in Warsaw, as well the Polish Academy of Sciences. Beck produced 180 publications and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physiology, in 1905, then in 1908, and finally in 1911, but he never received this high honor.
The Tragedy after so Long Life During the Second World War, life became even more troubled and dangerous for Beck than in the First World War. The city was occupied by the Nazis and Beck, who was of Jewish origin, remained in the town and suffered many humiliations. But instead of going into hiding, he chose to stay in his home in the shadow of the university to which he had given so many years of his life. But it became too risky, since many Jews were already murdered in the Janowska and Bełz˙ ec concentration camps, and several Lwów professors were killed on the Wuleckie Hills. The physiologist and medical doctor Zdzisław Bielinski, the successor of Beck in the Department of Physiology, started to take care of his old teacher. Together with Beck’s son Henryk, they found a hiding place for him. Just before his eightieth birthday, Beck became unwell and Henryk and Bielinski brought him to the hospital. But Beck was betrayed and at the last moment Henryk handed his father a capsule with cyanide to commit suicide before the Nazis could send him to the gas chambers. In the chaos, it is not known which day he committed suicide in August 1942, where his grave site is, or even if he were buried. Despite the tragedies in the Beck family, Beck’s suicide and the execution in Palmiry of Kazimierz Zakrzewski, the husband of Beck’s daughter Jadwiga, Beck’s son Henryk, born in 1896, a gynecologist and a unique, artistic talented person joined the Warsaw Uprising (see Fig. 6). Henryk Beck, who had previously served in the Polish army, became one of the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising. After the final capitulation in 1944, he went into hiding in the ruins of Warsaw and became one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. The life in the cellars, in suffocating air, heat, and darkness, while continuously under extreme danger, was a genuine torture. Yet, Henryk Beck provided medical assistance to the wounded and, moreover, with his artistic talents he managed to create a series of documentary drawings and watercolors about the war, his life, and his family in this situation (Jaworska, 1982; Zayachkivska, 2013). Henryk Beck survived the occupation and, in 1946, he got a chair in obstetrics in Wrocław, the former Breslau. After some months later he died of heart failure, undoubtedly following his sufferings during war time. Beck’s daughter Jadwiga Beck Zakrzewska was the only member of the Beck family who survived. In Supplement 3 of the Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis of 1973, with the translation of Beck’s dissertation,
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Figure 6. One of the last photographs of Beck made in 1938, together with his son Henryk, in his house in Warsaw. ©University of Lviv. Reproduced by permission of University of Lviv. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.
Jadwiga writes in A Daughter’s Memories of Adolf Beck her father’s death as the following: “His death was painfully tragic; in 1942 in Lwów, when this magnificent, strong man had reached the age of 80, after a beautiful and dedicated life, he took poison at the moment when the Germans came for him” (Beck Zakrzewska, 1973, p. 59). After the war, Jadwiga found in the remains of her burned house in ruined Warsaw, Beck’s ring, which was presented to him to regard his exceptional service to the Medical Faculty of the University of Lemberg/Lwów. The inscription “Bene merenti facultas medica” on the ring remembering Beck’s great merits was still legible.
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