Karl Friedrich Burdach and his place in the history of neuroanatomy.

The name of Burdach is associated usually with Naturphilosophie which, during the closing decades of the 18th and in the early 19th century, flourished in Germany. It was inspired by the speculative philosophies of Immanuel Kant's successors, and especially by Schelling, who regarded nature and mind as identical: to him nature was a preparatory stage (Vorstufe), in which mind could develop and unfold. Because they aie essentially the same, all manifestations of nature and its ever more differentiated stages (mineral, plant, animal, man) could be deduced by logical operations of the human mind. Schelling, who had only inadequate knowledge of natural sciences and of medicine, thus opened the gates wide for speculation-a development which, before the middle of the 19th century, led to the early eclipse of the romantic philosophy of nature. Yet in its earlier phase, nature philosophy cast its spell over many scientists and medical men: Goethe was, perhaps, its most illustrious and Lorenz Oken, the biologist, its most fanatical adherent; but it influenced many other distinguished men (at least temporarily)-for example, Johann Christian Reil, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Karl Gustav Carus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Ignaz Dollinger and Karl Ernst von Baer, the embryologists.3 Most of these workers accepted also vitalistic views as they had been developed earlier by Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), and, later, by Theophile Bordeu (1722-1776). Despite their adherence to nature philosophy, all these workers made notable contributions to their