Oskar Vogt

Oskar Vogt (April 6 1870 - July 30 1959 in Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German physician and neurologist. He was born in Husum -Schleswig-Holstein. Vogt studied medicine at Kiel and Jena, obtaining his doctorate from Jena in 1894.

Vogt was married to the French neurologist Cecile Vogt-Mugnier, whom he met in Paris while he was there working with Joseph Jules Déjérine and his wife, Augusta Marie Dejerine-Klumke, (who collaborated with him). The Vogt couple also collaborated for a long period of time, usually with Cécile as the primary author.

Oskar founded an Institute für Hirnforschung (Institute for Brain research) in Berlin, Germany. There, he had students from many countries who went onto prominent careers including Korbinian Brodmann and Brockhaus.

As a clinician, Vogt used hypnotism (Stuckrade-Barre and Danek 2004) up to 1903 and wrote papers on the subject.

Above all, Vogt had an intense interest for localizing psychology.

Vogt has been misrepresented as having accepted the Nazis. It is true that he was the personal practician of the Krupp family (canon facturer in the Ruhr Area, Essen). Fritz Krupp supported him financially probably particularly when the Vogts, driven away by the Nazis (1937), had to move to Neustadt and found a new Institute. In fact Vogt was a socialist, belonging to Mme Fessard who knew them personnally, to the guesdist trend of the French socialist party (Jules Guesde was at the most left wing of this party). He had never been a Communist, although he did interact with the Russians on a number of occasions. They sent him several researchers including Timofeev (that Solzhenitsyn met in jail). He helped to establish the brain institute in Moscow.

The Vogts had two daughters, both accomplished scientists in their own rights. Marthe Vogt (1903-2003) was a neuropharmacologist who became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Professor at Cambridge. Marguerite Vogt (1913-2007) started as a developmental geneticist working in Drosophila, then moved to this US in 1950. She developed methods to culture poliovirus with Renato Dulbecco. She was a faculty member at The Salk_Institute_for_Biological_Studies where she worked on viral transformation and cellular immortalization of cancer cells.

Institutes and journals
Vogt was the editor of the prominent Journal für Neurologie and Psychologie published in German, French and English which made many of the most important contributions between the two World Wars. This later became The Journal für Hirnforschung.

Lenin's brain
In 1924, Vogt was one of the neurologists asked to consult on Lenin’s illness and was given his brain for histological study after Lenin’s death. Lenin's brain showed a great number of "giant cells", which Vogt saw as a sign of superior mental function. "The giant cells" were cortical pyramidal cells of unusual size. There were also particularities in layer 3.

In 1925 Vogt accepted an invitation to Moscow where he was assigned the establishment of an institute for brain research in Narkomsdraw, Moscow. In 1945 Lenin's brain was still in the Institute of Berlin. According to claims of two Belgians, L. Van Bogaert and A. Dewulf, the Russians carried out a military operation specially to retrieve the brain before the Americans got it, and succeeded in doing so. The brain is now at Moscow's Institute.

Contribution
The contributions of the Vogts are of first order in several parts of the brain and had a considerable influence on international neurological sciences.

Cortex
This was apparently the main concern of Oskar who tried to find a correlation between anatomy and psychology. There were previous works of Campbel, but the Vogts and their coworkers really founded corticology. The Vogts imposed the distinction between iso- and allocortex. They also imposed rather rigidly the six-layer pattern (thy were 5 for Meynert and 7 for Cajal) in affirming that this was the normal pattern. They made cytoarchitectonic studies. One of their last students, Sanides, developed their notion of gradation.

Thalamus
Oskar made several presentations on his view on the thalamus in Paris. Oskar and Cécile referred to work of Constantin von Monakow on a series of mammalians. This was not a seminal work.

The main contribution of the Vogts was La myelocytoarchitecture du thalamus du cercopithèque from Cécile alone (1909). The great contribution of Cécile has been that the partition of the lateral region (lateral mass) should rely on the territories (the spaces occupied by) of the main afferents. She distinguished from back to front the lemnical radiation and a particular nucleus, in front of it the cerebellar (prelemniscal) radiation with another nucleus and more anteriorly the "lenticular" radiation. This system still is founding today the subdivision of the thalamus (Percheron, 1977, Percheron et al. 1996). Her paper was followed by Die cytoarchitechtonik des Zwishenhirns de Cercothipiteken from Friedmann (1911) traducing in cytoarchitectonics terms her partition.

A paper published in common in 1941 (Thalamus studien I to III), devoted to the human thalamus, represented an important step in partitioning and naming thalamic parts. The anatomy of the thalamus from Hassler (one of their students) was published in 1959, the year of the death of Oskar. It is not known weither the master accepted the excessive partition and unnecessary complication of this work that was an atlas dedicated to stereotacticans. The paper of 1941 was much simpler.

Basal ganglia
The Vogts greatly contributed to the analysis of what is known today as the basal ganglia system. Their main interest was on the striatum, that after Foix and Nicolesco they proposed (1941) to name so. This was including the caudate nucleus, the putamen and the fundus. One of their student (Brockaus) made an abusive cytoarchitectonic parcellation.

Their study of human pathological cases led them to discover particular striatal diseases and to the fact that the central region (centre médian-parafasicular) was degenerating after striatal region, i.e. that there was a strong centralo-striatal connection.

The Vogt-Vogt syndrome, an extrapyramidal disturbance with double sided athetosis occurring in early childhood, is named after the couple.