Georg Buchner: Anatomist of the animal brain and the human mind

摘要

The writer Georg Buchner (1813-1837) is considered one of the giants of German literature. Comparatively less well known, however, is the fact that Buchner was also a gifted neuroanatomist who completed his medical studies with a dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel (a freshwater fish with a high incidence in the River Rhine) and gave a lecture on cranial nerves shortly afterward, hoping to secure a position at the University of Zurich. In the copious secondary literature on Buchner, it has often been discussed whether and how his poetic and scientific writings were interrelated. In this article, I compare Buchner's anatomical and literary views of the brain and argue that two distinct perspectives on the organ were developed here. In the literary works, human behavior was linked to the brain in a manner that betrays the influence of Franz Joseph Gall's organology. In the anatomical writing, the brain appeared as an exemplar of natural harmony and beauty. In the one case, the brain appeared as an aristocrat, in the other as a pariah. I take this stark contrast to mean that Buchner understood the brain as an epistemically slippery, contradictory object that could only be approached from different angles.