Neuropsychiatric Departments in the Persian Hospitals from Ancient times to 15th Century

NEUROPSYCHIATRIC DEPARTMENTS IN THE PERSIAN HOSPITALS FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO 15 CENTURY Seyedeh Aida Ahmadi, Arman Zargaran Student Research Committee, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Iran ([email protected]), Research Office for the History of Persian Medicine, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Iran ([email protected]) The first hospital reported from 6 century AD was in the Jondishapour University as an educational and also therapeutic hospital. After the entrance of Islam to Iran, hospitals were growth all around Iran. Hospitals had different wards such as internal, surgery, orthopedic, pharmacy, gynecology, etc. and also different specialists who worked on. One of the interesting departments was for psychiatric and also neurologic disorders; in some hospitals there were two separate departments too. An especial location, namely “dar al majanin” was established for acute maniacs. On the other hand, many of famous Persian doctors who worked in hospitals had great achievements in neurosciences such as Rhazes. Others were specialist in neurology, such as Akhawaini, who was called “pezeshk e divanegan” (physician of maniacs). In this study have been considered the following hospitals: Azodi hospital in Shiraz (10 century AD), Mozafari hospital in Shiraz, Sahebi hospital in Tabriz (13 century AD), Ghazani and Rabe’ Rashidi hospitals in Tabriz (14 century AD). The importance of neurologic and psychiatric disorders in medieval Persian hospitals is clearly shown. History helps us to clarify some aspects of the development of neurosciences. MUSIC AND THE BRAIN AFTER BROCA Giuliano Avanzini National Neurological Institute Carlo Besta of Milan and International School of Neurological Sciences of Venice, Italy ([email protected]) Soon after Pierre Broca‟s pioneering observations on aphasia in 1861 the interest of some investigators turned to the cerebral representation of musical competences in the brain. The first attempts to localise musical functions can be found in papers published in 1865 by Bouillaud and 1888 by Knoblauch, who coined the word “amusia” and analysed the disturbed musical functions of patients with brain diseases. However, although interest never ceased, there were only relatively few further publications until 1977, when the now classic book “Music and the Brain”, edited by Macdonald Critchley and R. A. Henson came out. This book substantially alerted the scientific community to the neurological aspects of music by providing a complete account of the literature on the subject: no more than thirty papers, including that of Alajouanine [1948] on Ravel‟s degenerative encephalopathy and the paper by Luria et al [1965] on Shebalin‟s stroke. Subsequently, various groups gradually emerged that gave a new impetus to investigating the relationships between the neurosciences and music. The investigations have taken advantage of the wide range of modern techniques and have led to impressive advances in our understanding of the musical brain. The main groups interested in neurosciences and music were present at the conference “The Biological Foundations of Music” (New York 2000) sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, and at the series of “Neurosciences and Music” conferences sponsored by the Mariani foundation of Milano (Venice 2003, Leipzig 2005, Montreal 2008, and Edinburgh 2010). These meetings originated a series of volumes published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, which reflect the development of Neuromusic in the last ten years (Zatorre and Peretz 2001 Avanzini et al 2003, Avanzini et al 2005, Dalla Bella et al 2009) . FRANCIS SCHILLER, WILDER PENFIELD, AND THE NATURE OFT HE MIND Christian Baumann Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany ([email protected]) Francis Schiller (1909-2003) was a distinguished neurologist who devoted much of his scholarly competence to the history of his field. He is best known for the monograph on Paul Broca, the French explorer of the brain. Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) worked over several decades as a neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute and was famous for his successful treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy. As clinicians, both Schiller and Penfield were confronted with the problem of human consciousness. In addition to the practical aspects, Schiller and Penfield were interested in the neurophysiologic mechanism of consciousness. This question led them to formulate hypotheses concerning the interaction of mind and brain. Their ideas of the mind differed substantially. Penfield conceived the mind as an independent substance which directs the brain in action. Schiller maintained the view that the mind is not material: Mind is a word which stands, not for a thing or substance, but for a set of powers and activities. THE WOMEN‟S BRAIN AND MENTAL SKILLS: A NEVER ENDING STORY? Marina Bentivoglio Department of Neurological Sciences (DSNNMM), University of Verona, Italy ([email protected]) The history of localization of mental skills in the brain has implicated, over the centuries, approaches based on physiognomics, phrenology, and the study of élite brains. Women are rarely mentioned in physiognomics essays, except for stereotyped representations of aesthetic beauty or anomalies. Women have also received little attention in phrenology, although phrenological maps of women‟s heads can be found in the iconography of the times. Concerning the brain of gifted individuals, in the mid-1850s Rudolph Wagner described a remarkably convoluted appearance of the brain of the physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss but could not confirm such features in the brain of other intellectuals. Wagner, however, took for granted that the minor development of cerebral convolutions was characteristic of arrested individual formation and indicated as examples of such “minor development” the brains of women and black Africans. This was in line with the belief of other eminent scientists, including the French psychologist and anthropologist Gustave Le Bon, who wrote in 1879: “In the most intelligent of races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains...” Reports on the brain of famous women are very few, either because famous women were very few and/or that the woman‟s brain did not attract interest at times when scientists did not need to be “politically correct”. Gustaf Retzius, however, examined the brain of the Russian mathematician Sonja Kowaleskaya. James Papez investigated the brain of Helen Hamilton Gardener, an American freethinker, and indicated in his study that women‟s mental capacity was potentially equal to men‟s. Genderand sex-targeted neurobiology is nowadays in the forefront of neurosciences, but are we sure that the history of skills and women‟s brain has found an end? CULTURE AND POLITICS IN VENICE BETWEEN LATE 1500 AND EARLY 1600: GALILEI AND SARPI Gino Benzoni Fondazione Giorgio Cini Onlus, Isola di San Giorgio, Venice, Italy ([email protected]) The Serenissima Republic of Venice was an independent State located inside a country, Italy, that was in part subject to direct control by Spain and in part under the influence of the same country. The Republic itself was neutral, which did not mean, however, being unarmed. Venetians had fortified Bergamo and built the town of Palma to face the Hapsburg threat and the pressing and mobbing from Madrid and Vienna. Venice was diplomatically active, working for a solution of the crisis in France, which could help in balancing the international situation, and thus reducing Spanish predominance. This could allow for the independence of the Serenissima, which would otherwise ran the risk of suffocation. The free exercise of such independence was furthermore threatened by the interference of post-Tridentine Rome within the framework of mixti iuris (mixed jurisdiction). Sarpi (1552-1623) and Galilei (1564-1642) met against this background. They shared a passion for science, but had very different political attitudes and beliefs. Galilei's mind was focused on reading the “book of nature” through “mathematical sciences”. His truth, meaning the truth of science and in science, was super partes, and it did not belong to a history of confused turmoil. What Galilei demanded of history was an optimal basis for his own investigations. Proof of this is the fact that eventually he left Padua for the “terrazzo eminente” (eminent terrace) from which he could study the sky, i.e. the position offered to him by the Medici micro-absolutism in Florence. Venice would not provide him with anything like that. By doing so, however, Galilei left behind those who could defend him from Rome. Galilei was not aligned with any political parties. This did not mean – despite his neutrality – that he could avoid being affected by the turmoil of his times. In addition to the truth of science, truth should also be compatible with history. Galilei turned out to be a victim of history. On the other side, Sarpi was politically aligned. Coming out of the clash between Venetian and Papal power, he decided to fight by singing “political songs” and putting the “thought on natural and mathematical things” aside. He returned to those topics later on in his life, as his trust in history had weakened. COGNITIVE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY AND MENTAL PROCESSES: NEUROPHYSIOLOGY AND NEUROPSYCHOLOGY Giovanni Berlucchi Dipartimento di Scienze Neurologiche, Sezione di Fisiologia e Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy ([email protected]) The pioneering studies of the physiologist Angelo Mosso on bodily and cerebral concomitants of emotions and other mental activities in humans had established strong links between brain physiology and psychology in the Italian academia of the 19th century. These links were weakened in the first decades of the 20th century when academic physiologists thought that the best tradition of their discipline required them to work on many disparate organs, apparatus and functions of the body, and not solely on the nervous system, and that animals were preferable to humans as subjects for fully controlled experiments. The research style developed in England by Sherrington and Adrian, who as professors taught all of physiology but did their experimental work only on the nervous system, and are therefore known as bona fide neurophysiologists, was introduced in Italy in the 1950s by Giuseppe Moruzzi, who had been trained by Mario Camis, a pupil of Sherrington, and by Adrian himself. Moruzzi did not work on humans, but made major contributions to the understanding of mechanisms of human consciousness, and thus to neuropsychology, with his discovery with Magoun of the brainstem reticular formation, and with his midpontine cat preparation as an animal model of the human locked-in syndrome. I started my career as a neurophysiologist under Moruzzi more than 50 years ago, and the research interests that I have developed during a half century have brought me repeatedly in contact with neurologists, psychologists and other neurophysiologists attracted by the scientific enterprise called neuropsychology and more recently cognitive neuroscience. In this presentation I will describe some of my personal experiences as a participant to the foundation of the first neuropsychology group in Italy, a member of the International Neuropsychological Symposium, and a contributor to the editorial activities of the two earliest neuropsychological journals, Neuropsychologia and Cortex. ART AND NEUROLOGY: JEAN-MARTIN CHARCOT Julien Bogousslavsky Center for Brain and Nervous System Diseases / GSMN Neurocenter, Valmont Glion/ Montreux, Switzerland ([email protected]) Jean-Martin Charcot was one of the first clinicians to introduce systematic drawing of patients, lesions, and histological studies into the routine in hospital practice. Later in his career, he stimulated the use of photography for the same purpose, and was at the origin of the famous 3volume set of the “Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière”, which was produced by Regnard and Bourneville, and focused on patients with hysteria and epilepsy. He also supported the career of Paul Richer, who was both a neurologist and an artist, and who ended up as a full professor at the Beaux-Arts Institute in Paris. Thanks to Richer, several of Charcot‟s cases were immortalized in vivid drawings, which subsequently illustrated textbooks on hysteria and other topics. Their co-authored book on difformities in art has remained famous today. It was probably the first attempt to pick up and analyze specific diseases represented in religious and non-religious paintings, statues and architecture. But Charcot also used to make private drawings such as sketches of colleagues during boring faculty meetings, self-portraits which were surprisingly comical, and copies of medieval statues and pictures. A few drawings by Charcot under the influence of hashish are also known, at a time when experimental intake of this substance was popular in intellectual circles. However, Charcot‟s artistic tastes were rather conventional, and he never supported or acquired art from contemporary «avant-garde» artists, such as the impressionists. Charcot‟s home was overloaded with pseudo-gothic furniture, which suggested a capharnaum. Charcot‟s wife also painted flowers, and their son Jean-Baptiste inherited their skills, which he mainly used for drawing boats, even before he left neurology to become a famous polar explorer. TWO PROFESSIONAL GROUPS, TWO JOURNALS: A REFLECTION OF THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF NEUROPSYCHOLOGY IN ITALY AND IN EUROPE François Boller Bethesda MD, USA ([email protected]) This presentation focuses on the development of Neuropsychology in Europe and in Italy through the study of two groups, the International Neuropsychological Symposium (Symposium) and the World Federation of Neurology Research Group on Aphasia and Cognitive Disorders (RGACD). It will also relate the birth of the first Journals dedicated to Neuropsychology: Cortex and Neuropsychologia. The idea of creating a group “to promote knowledge and understanding of brain functions and cognitive issues on the borderland of neurology, psychology and psychiatry” saw the light in 1949 and led to the first Symposium in 1951. Early on, membership included, in addition to Henry Hécaen and Oliver Zangwill, neurologists mainly from Germany and Austria. Starting in 1964, participation of the Milan group and other Italian researchers became more and more noticeable. The topics covered at the Symposium meetings showed a gradual shift from syndromes to finer analyses of brain and behavior relationships, as well as processes such as consciousness and motivation. The RGACD (originally “Problem Commission on Aphasiology”) held its first meeting in Varenna, Italy in 1966. Many Italian neurologists (including Ennio DeRenzi, Luigi Vignolo, first Deputy Secretary and Guido Gainotti, Chair from 1984 to 1990) played a prominent role in its development. Initially dedicated mainly to language disorders, the group added Cognitive Disorders to its name in 1992. It now emphasizes other disciplines particularly Neuropsychology and Cognitive Psychology. The foundation of Cortex and Neuropsychologia was intertwined: when the original Editorial Board of Neuropsychologia heard about the project to create Cortex, they toyed with the idea of merging the two Journals because they felt that there was no room in the publishing world for more than one Journal. A 2004 publication (Sullivan et al., J Clin Exp Neuropsychol 26: 291, 2004) lists 31 Journals that are considered essential in clinical neuropsychology. AGALMATOPHILIA OR THE LOVE OF STATUES: FROM PSEUDO-LUCIAN TO DSM-IV Laura Bossi Paris, France ([email protected]) Many accounts attest that one can enjoy with a work of art relations more akin to those of carnal love than to the contemplative delectation one attributes to the connoisseur. Pygmalion was said to have fallen in love with a pretty ivory Venus he had sculpted. The goddess took pity on him and brought the statue to life. The myth has a happy ending: Pygmalion wedded the animated statue, and the couple lived happily ever after. His many imitators were less fortunate. Romantic poets such as Eichendorff or Heine relate many strange tales of love for statues (agalmatophilia), typically describing the adventures of a young man attracted by a graceful marble Venus. The prototype of these marble beauties is Praxiteles‟ Aphrodite of Cnidos, for which Phryne, a celebrated hetera, was said to have been the model. The pseudo-Lucian describes the enthusiasm of three young visitors who first see the statue in her sanctuary. When they notice a small blemish on her buttocks, the guardian tells them the incredible story of a young man who had desperately fallen in love with the goddess. One day, he slipped through the door, hiding himself in the innermost recess, and in the evening, he was locked into the temple. Need I mention, adds the pseudo-Lucian, “the daring assault perpetrated on that wicked night”? At day-break, the traces of his lovemaking were discovered, and the goddess bore the stain as a sign of the outrage she had suffered. As for the young man, he is said to have thrown himself into the waves of the sea. Dangerous fantasies! In agalmatophilia, there is always a hint of melancholy, of necrophilia even. It is the soothing arms of death that we seek in the marmoreal embrace. Literature may indeed offer a more insightful approach to agalmatophilia than psychiatry. KrafttEbing described several cases of Statuenschändigunen in his Psychopatia Sexualis (1893), but agalmatophilia was introduced in the anglo-saxon nosology only in 1975, by Scobie and Taylor. In 1994, it was admitted into the DSM-IV, among the paraphilias; and it may be “depathologized” in the DSM-V. CRYSTAL SOULS: ERNST HAECKEL‟S MONISM AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL Laura Bossi Paris, France ([email protected]) Neurophilosophy has revitalized the ancient debates between monism and dualism, and between different shades of monism. In this context the theories of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) deserve to be revisited. A fierce defendant of Darwinism, a leading systematist specialized in marine zoology, and the popularizer (if not the author) of the influential “biogenetic law” (ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny), Haeckel was a multifaceted genius: as the author of a first “synthesis” of evolution, linking morphology, comparative anatomy and embryology, he may be considered as the father of “evodevo”; his book Kunstformen der Natur influenced “art nouveau” artists such as Binet and Obrist; and he also acted as the prophet of a new materialist religion, Monism, that he preached through his popular books and through the German Monist League. This presentation will focus on Haeckel‟s idea of the evolution of the soul (Seele), based mainly on his lesser known writings Die Perigenesis der Plastidule (1876), Zellseelen und Seelenzelle (1878), Gottnatur (1914) and Kristallseelen (1917). Haeckel‟s monism resembles hylozoism, as his hierarchy of souls includes the inorganic matter. Atoms have a “proto-psychism”, attraction and repulsion being akin to and desires and aversions, as in Goethe‟s Wahlverwandschaften. Between atoms and cells Haeckel postulates an intermediate elementary particle, the “plastidule”, a material, living, thinking, remembering entity resembling Leibniz‟s monad. Cells have a “cellular soul” that is the integrated sum of the psychic life of the plastidules. Pluricellular organisms have a more complex soul integrating their cellular souls. Crowds, nations, have a collective soul. Haeckel thus attempts at providing a “monist and materialist” explanation of the mind and of its evolution, where life and mind are constitutive of the elementary components of living organism, the “plastidules”, which also carry heredity. Haeckel‟s monism has a distinct romantic character. A great admirer of Goethe, Haeckel sees Nature as divine (Gott-Natur), as the great Unity linking the inorganic and the organic world, the microcosmos and the macrocosmos, represented in an emblematic fashion by the genealogical trees showing the kinship of all natural beings. His chains of ancestors may be seen as a novel version of the scala natura of the Naturphilosophen. KARL POPPER'S ACADEMIC MISTREATMENT IN AUSTRALIA: AN UNINTENDED BENEFIT TO NEUROSCIENCE? John Carmody Discipline of Physiology and Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Sydney, Australia ([email protected]) Since historians can hardly experiment, asking "What if?" is their only substitute. There have been several such questions in Australia's intellectual history. One of the earliest concerns what might have happened to Australian biological science, not to mention the reception of Darwin's On the origin of species, if the first Senate of the University of Sydney had not inexplicably deleted TH Huxley's yearned-for professorship of Natural History from its small group of foundation Chairs in 1849? And what if Karl Popper had been appointed to one of the Australian academic positions for which he applied and not been forced to accept "exile" in New Zealand? While in Christchurch he met and convinced John Eccles (then working in New Zealand, also in a form of exile from Australia) that his dogged opposition to the concept of chemical, rather than his favoured electrical, transmission at synapses was not a career-destroying error; rather that this scepticism (or insistence on falsification of scientific theory) is the only authentic scientific approach. Revitalised, Eccles went on to do great work on synaptic inhibition and excitation in Dunedin and Canberra and to serious collaboration with Popper on several challenging books on neurophilosophy. What if Popper's application in 1938 for the Chair of Philosophy within the University of Queensland had not been rejected on blatant anti-semitic grounds? Or he had not felt the need to withdraw his application for an appointment in the Philosophy Department in the University of Sydney (1945) when he realized that (again for reasons of anti-semitism as well as xenophobia) his selection was highly contentious and approved by the Senate with the narrowest possible majority? Plainly, both of those universities made foolish and intellectually costly decisions -but what might have happened to the course of neuroscience if they had not acted so ignobly? "WET-BRAIN" AND "DRY BRAIN": COMPETITION AND ACCOMMODATION John Carmody Discipline of Physiology and Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Sydney, Australia ([email protected]) Our thinking tends to be determinative. In medicine, that can dictate both action and concepts. So when medicine transformed the Aristotelian notion of the four constituent elements of the world into the four humours, this made the brain, with the other organs, subject to their influence. Inevitably, the concept of the "wet-brain" was born. However, when, at the end of the eighteenth century, Galvani and Volta discovered "animal electricity" (which, in 1758, Hieronymus Gaubius had speculated to be the "vital force" of life), there was, in Kuhnian terms, a "paradigm shift". Thereafter, the gradual emergence of the cell theory of tissue structure and the eventual acceptance of the "neuron doctrine" demanded a new intellectual approach. How were the activities of discrete cells (notably in the integrated nervous system) to be co-ordinated? In 1897 Sherrington devised the term "synapsis" as the mechanism, and that concept triggered remarkable developments over the following quarter century or so. In 1902 Starling and Bayliss discovered secretin, then in 1905 Starling coined the word, "hormone" for this new class of agents. Just as Cajal's histology had radically confronted Golgi's conservative notion of the syncytial neural network, that hormone concept was the death-knell of Pavlov's belief in an exclusively neural basis for physiological controls. It was not long before the discovery of insulin (1916-1921) and Loewi's demonstration of chemical transmission at vagal endings. In this short time-span, scientific endocrinology and chemical neurotransmission were born. Around 1950 their conceptual fusion began. First with histological studies and then Harris showed that hormones can drive neurons: specific effects were exerted on reproductive behaviour from location of stilboestrol in discrete areas of the hypothalamus. Those revolutionary findings restored the importance of the wet-brain concept to parity with the previously dominant notion of the dry-brain and neuroendocrinology was born. AN ANTHOLOGY OF PROFESSOR CAMILLO NEGRO‟S NEUROPATHOLOGICAL FILMS Adriano Chiò, Claudia Gianetto, Stella Dagna Neurology Department, University of Turin, Italy ([email protected]), Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy ([email protected]) Camillo Negro (Biella, 1861 – Turin, 1927), a Turin-based neurologist, was a pioneer in experimenting with the new media of film for use in science and medicine. From 1906 to 1908, with help from Giuseppe Roasenda and in partnership with Roberto Omegna – one of Italy‟s most accomplished camera operators, who was also destined to play a leading role in national scientific cinematography – he filmed “classic examples” of the sick he treated at the Ospedale della Piccola Casa della Divina Provvidenza (also known as the Cottolengo) and in the nervous diseases wing of Turin‟s Policlinico Generale. This footage, whose original title was La neuropatologia and which was used for didactic purposes, was also screened in public during many scientific conferences. This work of film documentation, carried out by Camillo Negro and Roberto Omegna, continued during the First World War, filming soldiers admitted to Turin‟s military hospital. In 2011 the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, in partnership with the University of Turin‟s Faculty of Neurosciences, published a new edition of the neuropathological films made by Camillo Negro. Starting with the original footage present in the museum‟s own collection and materials that had already been preserved in the 1990s, the museum has suggested a new order for the episodes, reconstructed on the basis of original prints, it has separated those materials dealing with neuropathology and those dealing with war syndromes and includes new, unpublished materials. The museum‟s collection also includes 16mm footage probably filmed in the 1930s by Dr. Fedele Negro, Camillo‟s son. One of these films is devoted to celebrating the effects of the so-called "Bulgarian treatment" on Parkinson‟s disease. The footage was probably filmed to promote this treatment by presenting it to Queen Elena in the hope of gaining her financial and political support. Apart from its scientific value as a record of syndromes that today are very rare or non-existent, the new edition of La neuropatologia and Fedele Negro‟s films encourages us to reflect more generally on the relationship between doctors and patients and how impossible it is for the medium of film to remain impartial. INFLUENCES OF FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCHES ON NEUROPATHOLOGICAL CLINICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE DURING THE 19th CENTURY François Clarac, Jean-Gael Barbara CNRS, P3M, La Timone Marseille, France ([email protected]), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, CNRS, Paris, France([email protected]) How discoveries about the brain and the histology of the nervous system were used in the investigation of clinical neuropathologies? At the onset of the 19th century, the structure and on the properties of the nervous apparatus were largely ignored. After the disputes of Galvani and Volta on animal electricity, the pioneering works of Fontana and Rolando, the opposition between Gall and Flourens, studies were made at the level of the entire brain in order to characterize the different areas, while others in histology were made at the level of cellular organisations to define cellular bodies and peripheral fibers. In 1839, the two anatomists François Leuret (1787-1851) and Louis Gratiolet (1815-1865) described the comparative anatomy of different brains, describing different lobes and areas. Such “brain cartographies” were the beginning of other studies demonstrating the importance of localization in opposition of the theory of Flourens. The discovery of cellular organisations by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a great revolution affecting the Parisian scenes of neurology, physiology and anatomy. It was taken seriously and opened a large field of enquiry. It made possible the descriptions by Charcot and his pupils, Joffroy and Gombault, of the neuronal lesions involved in the paralysis of SLA. Such fundamental studies were crucial in the preclinical examination of patients. If at the start of the century, such analyses were not very as careful as at the end, these clinical examinations were particularly careful and well done as in the case of Joseph Babinski. NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY: HISTORICAL NOTES Carlo Cristini, Lorenzo Lorusso, Alessandro Porro Psychology Department, University of Brescia, Italy, Neurology Department, Mellino Mellini Hospital, Chiari, Italy, History of Medicine, University of Brescia, Italy ([email protected]) The relationship between neuroscience and psychology was basically born with Sigmund Freud, who in one of his first writings, “For a project of psychology (1895), introduces his General Scheme in the initial chapter: “The intention of this project is to express a psychology which appears as natural science, that is, to represent psychical processes as conditions determined in quantity from identified material particles, in order to make them clear and indisputable” (p.201), and later: “one of the main characteristic of the nervous tissue is memory, generally speaking, the faculty to suffer a permanent alteration following an event (...) The second system of neurons (ψ) could find itself in modified conditions following each excitement, and offer, therefore, the possibility to represent memory (...) impermeable neurons, which are the vehicles of memory and presumably also some general psychical processes” (pp. 204-205) and, furthermore, “We think, at the moment, that the system ψ identifies itself with the grey substance of the brain”(p.209). We find in Freud‟s works references to biological and neuro-scientific dimensions; in Introduction to Narcissism (1914): ”We must remind, thirdly, that all psychological notions which, from time to time are formulated, must some day be based on an organic sub-layer” (p.448); in Further to the principle of pleasure (1920): Besides, it should be unmistakably cleared that the uncertainty of our speculation has been considerably enhanced by the necessity to turn to biology. Biology is a field of unlimited possibilities, from which we can expect the most surprising clarifications; we cannot, therefore, imagine which answers it may give, within a decade, to problems which we have proposed. Maybe such answers could let all the artificial build-up of our hypothesis to fall” (p.245). Freud has knowledge of the relationship between biology (neuro-science) and psychology, he catches the interconnection and he suggests the possibility for a uniform and theoretical decoding. SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY IN GALILEO‟S THOUGHT Alfredo Damanti Università degli Studi di Bologna, Italia ([email protected]) The paper will focus on Galileo‟s conception of sense and reason in the scientific investigation and their (at least partly) controversial relationship to faith. This relationship will show Galileo‟s indebtedness to some areas of the Aristotelian philosophy and the tradition of Averroes, a longestablished and strong presence at Padua University. The question will be raised as to whether this cultural debt toward the Aristotelian side of Galileo, known for his mainly inclination towards Plato, was a tactical concession to his adversaries or reflected more genuinely his own opinion. THE HISTORY AROUND A GENETIC CONDITION FROM DEMON POSSESSED TO LESCH-NYHAN DISEASE Paola de Gemmis, Daniela Galla, Silvia Berto, Laura Anesi, Uros Hladnik Unità di Genetica, “Mauro Baschirotto” Istitute for Rare Diseases, Longare (VI), Italy ([email protected]) A young boy speaking in an incomprehensible manner, using foul words, moving with sudden and incontrollable movements, aggressive towards others and self-mutilating his body. Add to this terrible image the fact that this boy has to be bound to his bed to prevent him from hurting himself or others. There is little doubt that centuries ago this kind of a description would only fit a case of demonic possession and the restraints would be there to prevent the demon from doing harm. In 1963, a 4 years old boy with a similar story came to the attention of paediatrician and biochemical geneticist William Leo Nyhan and his student Michael Lesch at the John Hopkins Hospital. His terrible story had two distinctive additional features; he had uric acid crystals in the urine and a 4 years older brother with the same condition. The two brothers led to a scientific description of the condition and it became an X-linked recessive disorder with progressive mental retardation and a bizarre tendency to self-mutilation. Henceforth this condition became also known as Lesch-Nyhan disease (LND). It took less than three years for dr. Jarvis Edwin Seegmiller and his colleagues to identify that LND was due to the deficiency of the enzyme hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyltransferase. Science required several years until the gene encoding the human enzyme could be cloned and