theodor meynert became one of the first leaders of psychiatry as a clinical academic 
 discipline on the basis of dissecting dead human brains .
to some , this may seem puzzling . 
 why would a psychiatrist bother with dissection ?
in fact , meynert was not trained as a 
 psychiatrist since there was little of such available in the medical curriculum of the 
 1850s . 
 
instead , he studied principally the teachings and techniques of pathological 
 anatomy , practising how to cut open dead bodies and inspect the different tissues for signs 
 of disease from one of the most skilled physicians of the discipline , carl von rokitansky . 

indeed , rokitansky along with rudolf virchow helped introduce pathological anatomy as a 
 discipline to the medical curriculum . 
  still
, this does not directly answer why meynert s skill in dissecting post - mortem 
 human tissue would help him later to lead psychiatry at the university level .
that requires 
 a brief digression on the state of the field around the time meynert earned his medical 
 degree in 1861 .
that year the physician wilhelm griesinger published a new and expanded edition of his 
 textbook on psychiatry , in which he emphatically argued for the need to study the symptoms 
 and causes of mental illness strictly on the basis of brain diseases . 
 
reacting against a certain strain of physicians , or  alienists , who often managed 
 patients in relatively large asylums , griesinger called for a set of sweeping reforms that 
 would incorporate many asylums and asylum - managers into nearby university - clinics and 
 medical faculties so as to foster research on the somatic , neuropathological aspects of 
 mental illness rather than to let the patients allegedly languish under the so - called 
  asylum - fathers. 
  predictably , griesinger s demands for brain research and asylum reform met with 
 considerable resistance , but in 1865 he earned the chance to put some of his ideas to work . 
 he was appointed to the first academic chair of psychiatry and nervous diseases established 
 at the university of berlin and promptly set about lobbying for the institutional and 
 pedagogical reforms which he believed would give psychiatry a rightful place alongside other 
 specialties considered part of a new scientific medicine . 
 
although he had been able to carry 
 out several of the reforms , including the creation of new research - oriented clinics in 
 various universities , he did not contribute as much in the way of original research on the 
 specific anatomical causes of mental illness . 
 
however , he had galvanised a new generation in such a pursuit , and one of the young 
 physicians so motivated by griesinger s ambitious vision was theodor meynert . where 
 griesinger may have neglected to pinpoint the precise relationship between brain disease and 
 mental illness , meynert excelled . 
 
it was here in connection with forwarding psychiatric research on the basis of 
 neuropathology that meynert conspicuously led the way in the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century , helping shape the future of the discipline through students such as carl wernicke , 
 august forel and sigmund freud . 
 
the year griesinger was appointed to the new chair in berlin , meynert joined the medical 
 faculty in vienna as a lecturer on  the structure and function of the brain and spinal 
 cord. 
  for several years , he had worked as an assistant physician at the imperial asylum , 
 where he also performed autopsies on the patients who died there . as a result , he developed 
 his skill in pathological anatomy with a specific focus on the brain and nervous tissues . 

now in the position as instructor as well as clinical pathologist , he was groomed by 
 rokitansky , who by then had become university rector , to lead research on the brain from 
 within the ranks of the academy . 
  in a short time , he was appointed to the new chair of psychiatry in 1870 , the first 
 such position in the entire austro - hungarian empire and only the second after griesinger in 
 all of german - speaking europe . 
 
meynert s academic success and ultimately his leadership of the new anatomically oriented 
 psychiatry , later dubbed  brain psychiatry , 
  hinged precisely on his ability to dissect post - mortem human tissue and to detect 
 signs of disease , or structural damage and organic decay , that would suggest the 
 neuropathological basis of mental illness .
the fact that he became a psychiatrist on this 
 basis , not strictly by any specialty training but by forging and melding his own formation 
 from a general education in medicine and pathological anatomy , underscores that meynert was 
 able to play an instrumental role in giving psychiatry new shape , steering it to become in 
 his words  an exact psychiatric science. 

meynert s leadership of the new academic discipline of psychiatry was due not only to his 
 institutional authority but also his continued anatomical and pathological study of the 
 nervous system .
if his accelerated rise in the academy was in part thanks to rokitansky s 
 patronage , it was equally in recognition of his penetrating research on the brain and 
 nerves , specifically , his delineation of three kinds of nerve fibres comprising what he 
 called the projection , callosal and association fibre - systems . 
 
although there has been a tendency to credit meynert somewhat exclusively for the 
 differentiation of fibres in the brain , his delineation of their functions indisputably 
 shaped neuro - anatomical and -physiological research in the 1870s and 1880s . 
 
i argue that while neither his method of dissection nor most of his anatomical descriptions 
 was completely original , the way he was able to connect what he saw inside the brain with an 
 image of what he described as  inside the mind worked precisely because of his combination 
 of material and metaphorical techniques . in what follows , i will analyse two of meynert s 
 earliest publications , one from the same year he joined the medical faculty in vienna and 
 the other a case history from the following year , 1866 , which he initially delivered as a 
 presentation to the imperial - royal society of physicians . 
 
these two works represent a critical window on meynert s early development of his 
 theory of brain function , although they are often overlooked with few exceptions in relation 
 to his larger body of texts published after he became the full professor of psychiatry in 
 1870 . 
 
in order to appreciate the effectiveness of his research , however , these early 
 publications merit special attention , particularly as they provide some of his most vivid 
 and detailed descriptions of the brain s composition .
to start , i will introduce some of the 
 basic features of the first publication on the  anatomy of the cortex , culminating in his 
 brief sketch of how consciousness emerged from within the brain .
then , i will shift to 
 discuss his  case of a speech disturbance , paying special attention to his elaboration of 
 language functions along discrete pathways of brain fibre . from the opening lines of his chapter on cerebral anatomy , which appeared in a textbook 
 of psychiatry by his colleague maximilian leidesdorf in 1865 , meynert laid out the 
 fundamental aim of brain research for psychiatrists , namely , to discern the separate forms 
 of mental disturbance from a more general variety of mental disorder , or insanity 
 [ bldsinn ] .
organs inside the brain which gave 
 rise to basic mental representations [ vorstellungen ] in
but the lesson he drew was that damage 
 to one part did not necessarily entail damage to all .
some aspects of the mind , or what he 
 referred to collectively as the  life of ideas [ vorstellungsleben ] , 
 could remain completely intact despite the fact that some of its  intermediary organs 
 [ vermittelnden organe ] were destroyed .
strangulation [ abschnrung ] or cutting off of specific 
  idea - centres [ vorstellungscentren ] but overall the life of the mind 
 remained 
undisturbed. 
  in this serpentine first sentence , meynert was already making a claim to the basic 
 principle of specificity , that is , the specificity of organs , even parts of organs , in 
 relation to the specificity of disease .
such principle of mutual organic - pathological 
 specificity was critical to meynert and others hoping to demonstrate the scientific merit 
 of psychiatric research when allied with the anatomical - pathological study of the 
 brain . 
 
if certain parts of the brain serving certain  idea - centres of the mind could be 
 cut off or 
strangulated from the rest , without being affected , then not only did this 
 indicate an important division of brain function but also a degree of separation between 
 certain mental disturbances and all - out mental illness . 
  in other words ,
such specificity potentially expanded the remit of psychiatric 
 research from conspicuous mental disorder to virtually any disturbance distally affecting 
 the mind . 
 
it was a pivotal part of the bid to make psychiatry scientific , to make it 
precise. 
  what i want to focus on , though , is how meynert managed it , that is , how he 
 developed the thesis of such specificity with respect to the brain and nerves . as a clue , 

following their paths was prelude to finding their purpose . to appreciate meynert s emphasis on the role of nerve fibres inside the brain , one need 
 look no farther than the full title of his chapter ,  anatomy of the cortex as the carrier 
 of the life of ideas and its pathways of connection with the sensory surfaces and moving 
 masses. 
  for meynert , the outer layer of the brain , the cortex , contained or carried out 
 the life of ideas or mental representations .
but those ideas formed there only with the 
 help of specific pathways that connected the cortex to the rest of the nervous system . 
 only because of pathways connecting the brain to the rest of the body , and indeed to the 
 world , were ideas able to form at the outer limits of the nervous system in the  grey bed 
 of cortical tissue covering the brain . 
  
anatomical pathways [ anatomische bahnen ] , therefore , were the 
 essential meld of structure and function . 
 
they formed the basis in which the life of the mind was carried , or better , 
 carried out , through the life of the brain . 
  but how could meynert determine such activity or connectivity in dead brain tissue ?
what 
 qualified anyway as a pathway ? to understand this requires a closer 
 inspection of his method of dissection . and
the method that helped meynert most to discern 
 such path - like structures was known as abfaserung or 
de - fibering. 
  using a pair of tweezers or a needle , he gently scraped away the soft tissue of 
 the brain in order to expose its fibrous interior .
initially practised by karl friedrich 
 burdach in the early decades of the nineteenth century , it was gradually abandoned by most 
 anatomists because it demanded immense patience and skill to pull apart the fragile 
 strands of tissue without damaging or severing them . 
 
meynert , however , considering burdach s research of  the most essential value , 
 mastered the technique . 
 
because few others practised it by the 1860s , he was able to detect and depict 
 different features inside the brain , specifically long tracts of fibre , arguing that they 
 constituted both a  morphological and  physiological connection , that is , both the 
 structures of material support and functional communication . 
 
it was not simply that burdach s technique revealed to meynert the brain was made 
 up of fibre - like paths ( or path - like fibres ) , but rather by cutting or  de - fibering the 
 brain this way , he effectively shaped or 
the act of cutting into the 
 brain material was also a way of re - constituting it . 
  if meynert s technique of dissecting the brain was in part productive of its path - like 
 appearance
, so was his technique of describing the material tissue . while the de - fibering 
 method enabled him to follow out the strands of tissue deep into the brain and back out 
 onto its cortical surface , then his means of depicting those strands and their 
 trajectories helped him delineate their functions . out of the  thicket of fibre deep 
 inside the  inner core or
 pith [ innere gewebe ] of the brain , he 
 detected different bundles or sheaves [ bndel ] of  thread - like 
 [ fdenformige ] fibres that came together like 
projected 
 [ projicirt ] along different  lines [ zge or 
 projectionslinien ] through the brain . 
  by their many ramifications and radiations , like  streams of light or 
branches 
 of trees , these  wandering masses of fibre [ wendende fasermasse ] 
 culminated or were  filled out [ erfllung ] across the  surface of the 
 brain - mantle [ flche der hirnmantel ] . taken together , such branching 
 thread - like fibres wove a 
web [ gewebe ] that meynert collectively 
 referred to as the  connecting systems [ verknpfendenen systems ] of the 
 brain and nerves , later designated as the projection , association and callosal 
 fibre - systems . 
 
the novelty of meynert s research hinged on this delineation . specifically , it hinged on 
 a more fundamental designation of fibres as pathways with different 
 purposes .
others before him had also identified fibres in the brain , but the key 
 difference was that he imaginatively fleshed them out and traced them deep inside the 
 tissue . both materially and discursively , he elaborated on them and he elaborated in them . 
 for even though the language of fibres and paths was already part of what the historian of 
 medicine erna lesky called the  new plastic anatomical vocabulary ,
meynert re - shaped that 
 plastic imagery to new ends . 
  in describing the system of fibres confined to the cortex ,
morphological substrate of all connections between images and 
 ideas , memories and judgments , indeed , all the connections that ever 
threshold. 
  this imagery of connecting fibres , branches and threads was integral to meynert s account 
 of how both the brain and mind worked , and the imagery itself worked because it blurred 
 the difference between material form and mental function . 
 
it intimated a distinction between inner and outer , centre and periphery and lower 
 and higher , but like lines without spatial dimension , only direction , the image of fibres 
 potentially flattened these distinctions .
thread - like , they seemed able to pull thoughts 
 across some subconscious threshold .
only it was never clear which were the threads , the 
 fibres or the thoughts themselves , and what was pulling what . but even if such imagery was 
 ambiguous , it was nevertheless useful .
like the technique of dissection , meynert s tactics 
 of description were in part constitutive of the phenomenon .
yet like the tissue itself , 
 these tactical images were not easily pulled apart . for meynert ,
such enmeshed imagery helped to flesh out not only the material composition 
 of the brain but also to predict its lines of decomposition . just as the nerve fibres 
 carried out the contents of the mind along thread - like paths , those fibres , like threads , 
 could come undone . and when they did , the fabric of the mind would unravel . in 1866 ,
meynert published his first case history based on a presentation given before 
 the imperial - royal society of physicians earlier that year . 
 
it would be one of the first demonstrations of how psychiatrists could make use of 
 anatomical dissection of the brain to account for an isolated mental disturbance in terms 
 of fibre pathways .
although it was initially hailed as one of the first anatomical 
 descriptions of the trajectory of the auditory nerve from the inner ear through the 
 midbrain and finally to the outer cortex , it is generally less acknowledged as one of the 
 first clinical descriptions of a new type of language disorder . 
  a young woman , twenty - three years of age , had fallen ill due to what appeared to have 
 been constricted blood flow in her aorta . in particular , she had trouble speaking or what 
 meynert described as the  inhibition of verbal expression. 
  for example , she repeatedly mispronounced the word for  cough 
 ( hutzen instead of husten ) and confused the words for 
  head and  hand. when asked to repeat the word 
it was as if , according to meynert , she not only had trouble speaking but also to 
 some extent hearing .
he noticed especially how often she failed to 
 realise that what she said made little sense and  bore absolutely no relation to what she 
 was trying to say. 
  instead of recognising her  erroneous verbal expressions , they entirely 
escaped 
 [ entschlpften ] her attention , as though they had never entered 
 consciousness . 
 
two weeks later , the patient died , affording meynert the opportunity to perform an 
 autopsy on her brain .
what he found was a series of soft spots in a swollen area of 
 discoloured tissue near the sylvian fissure , a deep groove of tissue separating the 
 frontal and the temporal lobes . 
 
sound field [ klangfeld ] 
 or the cortical area where mental representations of sounds , including speech , were 
 formed . 
 
either the patient s trouble with speaking had been a result of her no longer 
 being able to form the correct mental representations of the sounds of words or the mental 
 representations she had were no longer connected with her memories , specifically the 
  memory - images [ erinnerungsbilder ] of those sounds of words . 
 
normally during the course of speech , he explained , sounds of words entered the body 
 through nerve endings lining the labyrinth of the inner ear .
these impressions or sensations then travelled along the pathways of fibres which 
 converged in a 
as these  sound - images continued along the pathways of fibre , they eventually 
 arrived at the  sound - field. there they were connected via different fibres to 
  word - images [ wortbilder ] as well as  memory - images. 
  in sum , this was the anatomical route of 
but in the case of the young woman , a part of that route had been disrupted .
disconnected. 
  a similar case of speech disorder had already been described in france by the 
 anatomist - cum - anthropologist paul broca . in 1861
, he declared to have discovered the 
  seat of articulate speech in the third convolution of the left frontal cortex . 
 
tan because that was virtually the 
 only sound he could make . when he died broca inspected leborgne s brain in search of signs 
 of damage or disease and identified a relatively isolated area of decayed tissue near the 
 posterior region of the frontal cortex , across from the sylvian fissure .
this was where , 
 he deduced , the  faculty of speech resided , that is , the mental capacity to execute and 
 coordinate the movement in the muscles of the face , mouth and throat to produce coherent 
 spoken language .
the distinction was critical for broca to uphold between language in 
 general and the function of articulation , for basically it amounted to a difference 
 between mind and muscle .
while he ruled out the possibility of direct muscular paralysis , 
 he attempted to avoid the rough equation of language tout court with just 
 this one area of the brain . instead , his anatomical 
he 
 only proposed that this area was responsible for the planning and execution of movements 
 related to speaking , that is , the  ideational basis of articulation . 
  not only was this nuance critical to avoid offending the sensibilities of some of the 
 french lite , but it also exposed a certain conceptual gap that meynert would try to fill . 
 whereas for broca , the speech disorder that came to be known as  aphasia involved 
 strictly the problem of articulation , for meynert it could also entail problems with 
 comprehension .
not only did 
 she fail to express herself properly , but she failed to realise her failure . the fact that 
 her errors  escaped her notice suggested to meynert that , on some level , she never really 
 
it should be emphasised that meynert did not appear to be proposing a whole 
 new language disorder but rather an added dimension to the aphasia broca had already 
 described .
the reason to draw this distinction is that one of meynert s students , carl 
 wernicke , would later re - parcel meynert s emphasis on the sensory aspect of speech 
 perception into a new and distinct form of aphasia separate from broca s . in 1874 , 

wernicke published a large study featuring several of his own case histories of aphasia , 
 including some which involved broca s aphasia of articulation , re - classified as  motor 
 aphasia , and a new type he characterised as 
sensory. 
  from the beginning of his paper , he was very clear about his reliance on meynert s 
 research , openly declaring ,  [ e]verything of value in the present study is ultimately 
 based on meynert s work. 
  nevertheless , for reasons which would require a more dedicated discussion , 
 wernicke earned much of the credit . 
  even though meynert did not firmly differentiate between broca s aphasia and his 
 patient s speech disorder , the fact that he emphasised the sensory aspects of her 
 dysfunction is an important clue to how he drew on a general philosophical understanding 
 of the mind to elaborate the functions of the brain .
if the language of fibres , cords and 
 strings was by and large borrowed from burdach and others , meynert s references to 
  memory - images and the  threshold of consciousness reflected an ample infusion of the 
 latest variety of 
associationism promulgated by philosophical psychologists such as 
 gustav fechner . by the middle of the nineteenth century
, the theories of mental 
 association had passed through at least two centuries of revision from locke and hume to 
 condillac and comte before coming to meynert probably through the writings of lotze and 
 fechner . 
 
but it is likely that fechner helped most of all to shape how german - speaking 
 physicians and philosophers , physiologists and psychologists , thought about the mind in 
 the late nineteenth century . 
 
fechner , though adapting such terms as  memory - images from johann friedrich herbart , 
 kant s successor in knigsberg , reworked many of the themes of associationism in his own 
 elements of psychophysics published in 1860 . 
 
arguing that all psychological phenomena could be understood in the same way as 
 mechanical phenomena , fechner nevertheless deferred submitting to an outright materialism . 
 rather , he preferred to view the mind as the  resultant function of the brain but not 
 ontologically equivalent to its material structures . 
 
his fellow colleague at leipzig , rudolf hermann lotze , had similarly attempted to 
 sidestep a strict materialism in his own textbook published in 1858 , medical 
 psychology , or the physiology of the mind . 

 
he also defended both physiological and psychological research but strictly on the 
 grounds of a 
appearances or 
 manifestations of mental activity and the  essence of the mind itself .
while there was no 
 way for science to know anything about the true essence of the mind , or even soul ( in 
 german , it was the same word , seele ) , its activities and functions 
 remained completely within bounds . 
 
fechner and lotze were both reacting to some of the cruder varieties of scientific 
 materialism still circulating since the liberals defeat in 1848 . with their more 
 circumspect and self - critical language about the mind and its relation to the brain , they 
 provided an outlet for researchers like meynert to continue with their work . 
 
thanks to lotze and fechner , meynert was careful just enough to avoid collapsing 
 the life of the mind into the life of the brain , preferring to frame the latter as the 
 material 
were  carried out or conducted by 
 fibres which  allowed for their association . 
 
this was tentative language not only of a young academic aspirant but also an 
 anatomically oriented psychiatrist who appreciated the philosophical and theological 
 perils of roughly equating the mind and the brain .
still , despite such rhetorical 
 restraint , meynert did not avoid insinuating some degree of material continuity between 
 the inner life of the mind and the inner structure of the brain . 
  and
the principal reason for this lay in his vivid elaboration of the fibres and 
 the nerves , which , because he followed them like threads , led him to imagine the ideas 
 themselves as such , indeed the whole of mental life as such : a web woven from the brain 
 [ hirnschenkel ] , a mere  physiological tabula rasa made up of 
 connections and paths . 
 
meynert considered all the higher mental functions as combined products of 
 sensations and movements , at least the 
images thereof , and so he accounted for his 
 patient s speech disorder as both a matter of articulation and 
 comprehension .
articulatory centre but also because she lacked certain  ideas of sound 
 [ klangvorstellungen ] . 
 
this was most evident , meynert maintained , because she failed to catch her own 
 mistakes , that is , she no longer 
either that , or it was 
 because of the discoloured swelling of tissue in the  field of sound. in point of fact , 
 the clinical - psychological description and the anatomical - pathological delineation were 
 mutually reinforcing .
they seemed to be self - implicating and entangled , which was part of 
 what made meynert s model compelling .
the language of a mental disconnect prefigured that 
 of a material one . what meynert designated as 
loose threads [ losen 
 fden ] of fibre inside the brain extended to and were insinuated by some sense of 
 unravelling connections somehow , somewhere 
what this meant in terms of 
 a more distributed and interconnected theory of cognition was of paramount importance . 
 for ,
even by diffusing mental functions thus , along fibre nets , mesh , or webs , meynert 
 effectively reconstituted a material image of the mind .
from the opening lines of his chapter on cerebral anatomy , which appeared in a textbook 
 of psychiatry by his colleague maximilian leidesdorf in 1865 , meynert laid out the 
 fundamental aim of brain research for psychiatrists , namely , to discern the separate forms 
 of mental disturbance from a more general variety of mental disorder , or insanity 
 [ bldsinn ] .
organs inside the brain which gave 
 rise to basic mental representations [ vorstellungen ] in
but the lesson he drew was that damage 
 to one part did not necessarily entail damage to all .
some aspects of the mind , or what he 
 referred to collectively as the  life of ideas [ vorstellungsleben ] , 
 could remain completely intact despite the fact that some of its 
strangulation [ abschnrung ] or cutting off of specific 
  idea - centres [ vorstellungscentren ] but overall the life of the mind 
 remained 
undisturbed. 
  in this serpentine first sentence , meynert was already making a claim to the basic 
 principle of specificity , that is , the specificity of organs , even parts of organs , in 
 relation to the specificity of disease .
such principle of mutual organic - pathological 
 specificity was critical to meynert and others hoping to demonstrate the scientific merit 
 of psychiatric research when allied with the anatomical - pathological study of the 
 brain . 
  if certain parts of the brain serving certain  idea - centres of the mind could be 
 cut off or 
strangulated from the rest , without being affected , then not only did this 
 indicate an important division of brain function but also a degree of separation between 
 certain mental disturbances and all - out mental illness . 
  in other words ,
such specificity potentially expanded the remit of psychiatric 
 research from conspicuous mental disorder to virtually any disturbance distally affecting 
 the mind . 
 
it was a pivotal part of the bid to make psychiatry scientific , to make it 
precise. 
  what i want to focus on , though , is how meynert managed it , that is , how he 
 developed the thesis of such specificity with respect to the brain and nerves . as a clue , 

following their paths was prelude to finding their purpose . to appreciate meynert s emphasis on the role of nerve fibres inside the brain , one need 
 look no farther than the full title of his chapter ,  anatomy of the cortex as the carrier 
 of the life of ideas and its pathways of connection with the sensory surfaces and moving 
 masses. 
  for meynert , the outer layer of the brain , the cortex , contained or carried out 
 the life of ideas or mental representations .
but those ideas formed there only with the 
 help of specific pathways that connected the cortex to the rest of the nervous system . 
 only because of pathways connecting the brain to the rest of the body , and indeed to the 
 world , were ideas able to form at the outer limits of the nervous system in the  grey bed 
 of cortical tissue covering the brain . 
 
 anatomical pathways [ anatomische bahnen ] , therefore , were the 
 essential meld of structure and function . 
 
they formed the basis in which the life of the mind was carried , or better , 
 carried out , through the life of the brain . 
  but how could meynert determine such activity or connectivity in dead brain tissue ?
what 
 qualified anyway as a pathway ? to understand this requires a closer 
 inspection of his method of dissection . and
the method that helped meynert most to discern 
 such path - like structures was known as abfaserung or 
de - fibering. 
  using a pair of tweezers or a needle , he gently scraped away the soft tissue of 
 the brain in order to expose its fibrous interior .
initially practised by karl friedrich 
 burdach in the early decades of the nineteenth century , it was gradually abandoned by most 
 anatomists because it demanded immense patience and skill to pull apart the fragile 
 strands of tissue without damaging or severing them . 
 
meynert , however , considering burdach s research of  the most essential value , 
 mastered the technique . 
 
because few others practised it by the 1860s , he was able to detect and depict 
 different features inside the brain , specifically long tracts of fibre , arguing that they 
 constituted both a  morphological and  physiological connection , that is , both the 
 structures of material support and functional communication . 
 
it was not simply that burdach s technique revealed to meynert the brain was made 
 up of fibre - like paths ( or path - like fibres ) , but rather by cutting or 
the act of cutting into the 
 brain material was also a way of re - constituting it . 
  if meynert s technique of dissecting the brain was in part productive of its path - like 
 appearance
, so was his technique of describing the material tissue . while the de - fibering 
 method enabled him to follow out the strands of tissue deep into the brain and back out 
 onto its cortical surface , then his means of depicting those strands and their 
 trajectories helped him delineate their functions . out of the  thicket of fibre deep 
 inside the  inner core or
 pith [ innere gewebe ] of the brain , he 
 detected different bundles or sheaves [ bndel ] of  thread - like 

projected 
 [ projicirt ] along different  lines [ zge or 
 projectionslinien ] through the brain . 
  by their many ramifications and radiations , like  streams of light or 
branches 
 of trees , these  wandering masses of fibre [ wendende fasermasse ] 
 culminated or were  filled out [ erfllung ] across the  surface of the 
 brain - mantle [ flche der hirnmantel ] . taken together , such branching 
 thread - like fibres wove a 
web [ gewebe ] that meynert collectively 
 referred to as the  connecting systems [ verknpfendenen systems ] of the 
 brain and nerves , later designated as the projection , association and callosal 
 fibre - systems . 
 
specifically , it hinged on 
 a more fundamental designation of fibres as pathways with different 
 purposes .
others before him had also identified fibres in the brain , but the key 
 difference was that he imaginatively fleshed them out and traced them deep inside the 
 tissue . both materially and discursively , he elaborated on them and he elaborated in them . 
 for even though the language of fibres and paths was already part of what the historian of 
 medicine erna lesky called the 
new plastic anatomical vocabulary , meynert re - shaped that 
 plastic imagery to new ends . 
  in describing the system of fibres confined to the cortex ,
morphological substrate of all connections between images and 
 ideas , memories and judgments , indeed , all the connections that ever 
threshold. 
  this imagery of connecting fibres , branches and threads was integral to meynert s account 
 of how both the brain and mind worked , and the imagery itself worked because it blurred 
 the difference between material form and mental function . 
 
it intimated a distinction between inner and outer , centre and periphery and lower 
 and higher , but like lines without spatial dimension , only direction , the image of fibres 
 potentially flattened these distinctions .
thread - like , they seemed able to pull thoughts 
 across some subconscious threshold .
only it was never clear which were the threads , the 
 fibres or the thoughts themselves , and what was pulling what . but even if such imagery was 
 ambiguous , it was nevertheless useful .
like the technique of dissection , meynert s tactics 
 of description were in part constitutive of the phenomenon . yet like the tissue itself , 
 these tactical images were not easily pulled apart . for meynert ,
such enmeshed imagery helped to flesh out not only the material composition 
 of the brain but also to predict its lines of decomposition .
just as the nerve fibres 
 carried out the contents of the mind along thread - like paths , those fibres , like threads , 
 could come undone . and
in 1866 , meynert published his first case history based on a presentation given before 
 the imperial - royal society of physicians earlier that year . 
 
it would be one of the first demonstrations of how psychiatrists could make use of 
 anatomical dissection of the brain to account for an isolated mental disturbance in terms 
 of fibre pathways .
although it was initially hailed as one of the first anatomical 
 descriptions of the trajectory of the auditory nerve from the inner ear through the 
 midbrain and finally to the outer cortex , it is generally less acknowledged as one of the 
 first clinical descriptions of a new type of language disorder . 
 
a young woman , twenty - three years of age , had fallen ill due to what appeared to have 
 been constricted blood flow in her aorta . in particular , she had trouble speaking or what 
 meynert described as the  inhibition of verbal expression. 
  for example , she repeatedly mispronounced the word for  cough 
 ( hutzen instead of husten ) and confused the words for 
  head and  hand. when asked to repeat the word 
it was as if , according to meynert , she not only had trouble speaking but also to 
 some extent hearing .
he noticed especially how often she failed to 
 realise that what she said made little sense and  bore absolutely no relation to what she 
 was trying to say. 
  instead of recognising her  erroneous verbal expressions , they entirely 
escaped 
 [ entschlpften ] her attention , as though they had never entered 
 consciousness . 
 
two weeks later , the patient died , affording meynert the opportunity to perform an 
 autopsy on her brain .
what he found was a series of soft spots in a swollen area of 
 discoloured tissue near the sylvian fissure , a deep groove of tissue separating the 
 frontal and the temporal lobes . 
 
sound field [ klangfeld ] 
 or the cortical area where mental representations of sounds , including speech , were 
 formed . 
 
either the patient s trouble with speaking had been a result of her no longer 
 being able to form the correct mental representations of the sounds of words or the mental 
 representations she had were no longer connected with her memories , specifically the 
  memory - images [ erinnerungsbilder ] of those sounds of words . 
 
normally during the course of speech , he explained , sounds of words entered the body 
 through nerve endings lining the labyrinth of the inner ear .
these impressions or sensations then travelled along the pathways of fibres which 
 converged in a 
as these  sound - images continued along the pathways of fibre , they eventually 
 arrived at the  sound - field. there they were connected via different fibres to 
  word - images [ wortbilder ] as well as  memory - images. 
  in sum , this was the anatomical route of  speech comprehension 
 [ sprachverstndniss ] . 
 
but in the case of the young woman , a part of that route had been disrupted .
disconnected. 
  a similar case of speech disorder had already been described in france by the 
 anatomist - cum - anthropologist paul broca . in 1861
, he declared to have discovered the 
  seat of articulate speech in the third convolution of the left frontal cortex . 
 
tan because that was virtually the 
 only sound he could make . when he died broca inspected leborgne s brain in search of signs 
 of damage or disease and identified a relatively isolated area of decayed tissue near the 
 posterior region of the frontal cortex , across from the sylvian fissure .
this was where , 
 he deduced , the  faculty of speech resided , that is , the mental capacity to execute and 
 coordinate the movement in the muscles of the face , mouth and throat to produce coherent 
 spoken language .
the distinction was critical for broca to uphold between language in 
 general and the function of articulation , for basically it amounted to a difference 
 between mind and muscle .
while he ruled out the possibility of direct muscular paralysis , 
 he attempted to avoid the rough equation of language tout court with just 
 this one area of the brain . instead , his anatomical 
he 
 only proposed that this area was responsible for the planning and execution of movements 
 related to speaking , that is , the  ideational basis of articulation . 
  not only was this nuance critical to avoid offending the sensibilities of some of the 
 french lite , but it also exposed a certain conceptual gap that meynert would try to fill . 

whereas for broca , the speech disorder that came to be known as  aphasia involved 
 strictly the problem of articulation , for meynert it could also entail problems with 
 comprehension .
not only did 
 she fail to express herself properly , but she failed to realise her failure . the fact that 
 her errors  escaped her notice suggested to meynert that , on some level , she never really 
 
it should be emphasised that meynert did not appear to be proposing a whole 
 new language disorder but rather an added dimension to the aphasia broca had already 
 described .
the reason to draw this distinction is that one of meynert s students , carl 
 wernicke , would later re - parcel meynert s emphasis on the sensory aspect of speech 
 perception into a new and distinct form of aphasia separate from broca s . in 1874 , 

wernicke published a large study featuring several of his own case histories of aphasia , 
 including some which involved broca s aphasia of articulation , re - classified as  motor 
 aphasia , and a new type he characterised as 
sensory. 
  from the beginning of his paper , he was very clear about his reliance on meynert s 
 research , openly declaring ,  [ e]verything of value in the present study is ultimately 
 based on meynert s work. 
  nevertheless , for reasons which would require a more dedicated discussion , 
 wernicke earned much of the credit . 
  even though meynert did not firmly differentiate between broca s aphasia and his 
 patient s speech disorder , the fact that he emphasised the sensory aspects of her 
 dysfunction is an important clue to how he drew on a general philosophical understanding 
 of the mind to elaborate the functions of the brain .
if the language of fibres , cords and 
 strings was by and large borrowed from burdach and others , meynert s references to 
  memory - images and the  threshold of consciousness reflected an ample infusion of the 
 latest variety of 
associationism promulgated by philosophical psychologists such as 
 gustav fechner . by the middle of the nineteenth century
, the theories of mental 
 association had passed through at least two centuries of revision from locke and hume to 
 condillac and comte before coming to meynert probably through the writings of lotze and 
 fechner . 
 
but it is likely that fechner helped most of all to shape how german - speaking 
 physicians and philosophers , physiologists and psychologists , thought about the mind in 
 the late nineteenth century . 
 
fechner , though adapting such terms as  memory - images from johann friedrich herbart , 
 kant s successor in knigsberg , reworked many of the themes of associationism in his own 
 elements of psychophysics published in 1860 . 
 
arguing that all psychological phenomena could be understood in the same way as 
 mechanical phenomena , fechner nevertheless deferred submitting to an outright materialism . 

rather , he preferred to view the mind as the  resultant function of the brain but not 
 ontologically equivalent to its material structures . 
 
his fellow colleague at leipzig , rudolf hermann lotze , had similarly attempted to 
 sidestep a strict materialism in his own textbook published in 1858 , medical 
 psychology , or the physiology of the mind . 

 
he also defended both physiological and psychological research but strictly on the 
 grounds of a 
appearances or 
 manifestations of mental activity and the  essence of the mind itself .
while there was no 
 way for science to know anything about the true essence of the mind , or even soul ( in 
 german , it was the same word , seele ) , its activities and functions 
 remained completely within bounds . 
 
fechner and lotze were both reacting to some of the cruder varieties of scientific 
 materialism still circulating since the liberals defeat in 1848 . with their more 
 circumspect and self - critical language about the mind and its relation to the brain , they 
 provided an outlet for researchers like meynert to continue with their work . 
 
thanks to lotze and fechner , meynert was careful just enough to avoid collapsing 
 the life of the mind into the life of the brain , preferring to frame the latter as the 
 material 
were  carried out or conducted by 
 fibres which  allowed for their association . 
 
this was tentative language not only of a young academic aspirant but also an 
 anatomically oriented psychiatrist who appreciated the philosophical and theological 
 perils of roughly equating the mind and the brain .
still , despite such rhetorical 
 restraint , meynert did not avoid insinuating some degree of material continuity between 
 the inner life of the mind and the inner structure of the brain . 
  and
the principal reason for this lay in his vivid elaboration of the fibres and 
 the nerves , which , because he followed them like threads , led him to imagine the ideas 
 themselves as such , indeed the whole of mental life as such : a web woven from the brain 
 [ hirnschenkel ] , a mere  physiological tabula rasa made up of 
 connections and paths . 
 
meynert considered all the higher mental functions as combined products of 
 sensations and movements , at least the 
images thereof , and so he accounted for his 
 patient s speech disorder as both a matter of articulation and 
 comprehension .
articulatory centre but also because she lacked certain  ideas of sound 
 [ klangvorstellungen ] . 
 
this was most evident , meynert maintained , because she failed to catch her own 
 mistakes , that is , she no longer 
either that , or it was 
 because of the discoloured swelling of tissue in the  field of sound. in point of fact , 
 the clinical - psychological description and the anatomical - pathological delineation were 
 mutually reinforcing .
they seemed to be self - implicating and entangled , which was part of 
 what made meynert s model compelling .
the language of a mental disconnect prefigured that 
 of a material one . what meynert designated as 
loose threads [ losen 
 fden ] of fibre inside the brain extended to and were insinuated by some sense of 
 unravelling connections somehow , somewhere 
what this meant in terms of 
 a more distributed and interconnected theory of cognition was of paramount importance . 
 for ,
even by diffusing mental functions thus , along fibre nets , mesh , or webs , meynert 
 effectively reconstituted a material image of the mind .
the basic appeal of meynert s imagery of the brain fibres as specialised pathways of the 
 mind drew on a powerful intuition , historical and cultural , that whatever the mind was it 
 had to do with making connections and those connections were to some degree internal , taking 
 place in some 
it was only in the mid - seventeenth century that such an inner space of the mind came 
 to be elaborated within the inner solid tissues of the brain , above all , the intricate nerve 
 fibres . 
 
two centuries later , meynert built upon and extended this intuition by further 
 delineating and articulating the fibres in terms of separate functional systems and then 
 collating them as the material concretion of a connection - making mind .
he deepened the 
 appeal of this basic image of the mind as one fleshed out inside the brain by imaginatively 
 following it farther , retracing its wandering threads and recreating an even more intricate 
 and seemingly more precise anatomical - physiological portrait of how the mind was made up , 
 and broken down , along the lines of the brain .
the draw of his work , therefore , had to do with its level of depth and detail , or at least 
 the intimation that he had been able to explore farther and see further into the brain . and 

the success of such an intimation of insight and depth depended in part on his description 
 of the material , indeed , the  imagination of the material. this phrase comes from the 
 french philosopher of science gaston bachelard who in the late 1930s attempted what he 
 called a 
repression 
 and  rupture against a more primitive state of mind , which he believed to be , though 
 intrinsic to literary creativity , the source of scientific error and epistemological 
 obstacles . 
  without fully subscribing to such a division ,
however , i propose to develop 
 bachelard s exploration of what he called the  images of material , particularly , the 
 material imagination of  the inside , in relation to meynert s imagery of 
 the brain . 
 
scholars have analysed meynert s rather extensive use of metaphors , especially in his later 
 work .
the historian of science michael hagner discusses , for example , meynert s comparison 
 of the nervous system to the austro - hungarian empire , in which the cortex represented the 
  capital and the rest of the brain ,  provinces. 
  elsewhere , hagner notes , meynert described the brain as a  colony of living 
 conscious beings. 
  such comparisons were not purely for provocation . in the case of the colony 
 metaphor , meynert insisted it was a literal description .
the brain really was in a 
 significant sense made up of a collection of different forms of conscious life . 
 
when meynert 
 compared the human nervous system to the  feelers and  tentacles of the amoeba and 
 jellyfish , these were not  mere metaphors . 
  for meynert , they denoted actual anatomical features common to both the complex 
 human being and some of the simplest of life forms . 
 
they expressed , in borck s words , the  physiological principle that all life was 
  organized the same from the inside out. 
  but , as borck points out , even such ostensible equivalence could do polemical work . 

indeed , no matter the degree of anatomical verisimilitude or morphological literalism , these 
 shared terms implied a broader  explanatory strategy , and that was to identify the 
 biological basis of the mind . 
 
despite penetrating investigation of meynert s political , biological and technological 
 comparisons , few scholars have analysed meynert s metaphors of the material itself .
this is 
 what i have endeavoured to do , focusing on his tactics of describing the nerve fibres in 
 terms of  thread - like paths carrying out mental images in the brain and , like material 
 threads , susceptible of loosening and tearing not only in the brain but equally 
 in the mind . and
it was this problematic preposition  in that meynert , 
 despite attempting to disperse it with his emphasis on fibres , could not ultimately escape , 
 if only because  of the basic spatial language of the brain composed of an inner core and 
 outer crust , and the inner fibres condensed into bundles and bands , branches and roots with 
 a ground beneath and surface above . 
  throughout his work
, there was this back - and - forth , up - and - down , in - and - out 
 propulsion .
no matter how carefully he elaborated the mind s functions therein , there always 
 remained this problematic image of 
in. for bachelard , images of interiority were basic to the imagination of material . in the 
 second volume of his earth series published in 1948 , he described how 
 certain dream - like states of mind , or 
reveries , before certain objects elicited the 
 imagination of refuge and repose . whether by contemplating the hidden centre of a seed or 
 the creeping depths of roots , whether wandering the labyrinthine channels of an underground 
 cave or pondering the undisclosed insides of one s own body , all these were  material 
 images inviting the reverie of intimacy , depth and interiority . 
 
they conveyed a meaning beyond themselves and yet always seemed 
 to implicate themselves in that meaning . 
 
meynert invoked such material - metaphors of depth and interiority in his language of the 
 wandering fibre - masses in the brain and winding pathways in the mind , using them in turn as 
 anatomical elaborations and psychological explanations . while evocative of woven fabric or 
 growing roots , these images of fibre , thread , limb and stem , were nevertheless literal , 
 material , anatomical designations of the brain s  knotty makeup . 
  and
yet , they functioned as the imagined conduits for the material elaboration of 
 the mind he was cautious to provide .
material images of  mental images 
 [ bilder ] , they worked less by explanation than by insinuation .
that was 
 what made meynert s morphological model of the brain so powerful , so object - oriented , that 
 it seemed to efface the difference between anatomy and image , material and metaphor . 
 
the fibre , both as a form of physical connection and mental conduction , served to 
 unite structure and function , brain and mind . and
what if meynert s images of the material could not help 
 but be insinuated into the language of the mind ? would this mean he was captive to the 
 purported universal dynamics of the imagination ? or was he perhaps simply redeploying 
 historical discursive conventions of framing the mind in terms of the brain ?
each scenario fails to account for the particular 
 impact meynert had on subsequent models of the brain and , for that matter , on philosophical 
 ideas about the mind .
one could be forgiven for imputing such an impact to a confluence of 
 the institutional clout of science , the intellectual currents of materialism , and the dogged 
 if desperate hope of delivering humanity from mental illness .
but that would arguably still 
 miss part of the point and much of the punch to meynert s particular theories about the 
 functions of fibre - paths .
no doubt , these other connections were indissociable from the 
 coherence of meynert s work , but what i want to suggest is that his anatomical - physiological 
 imagination of pathways in the brain re - entrenched a much older intuition about the 
  innerness of the mind . while bachelard believed that the image of interiority was integral to the unconscious , 
 others have recently argued that it is itself an historical artefact of modern thought . in 
 as much as it may seem inevitable to think of mental features as 
inner , even this has 
 cultural roots , as it were , tracing back at least to augustine , if not before . 
 
if so , bachelard s alleged distinction between objective science and the poetic 
 imagination would need modification .
although he maintained that features of the imagination 
 were intrinsic to the mind , he also claimed by contrast that the development of scientific 
 knowledge demanded a degree of breaking with the imagination :  when we turn inwards upon 
 ourselves we turn aside from truth. 
  objective knowledge was attainable only by explicitly resisting the 
false weight 
 of  familiar experiences. 
  even though the  intuition of inwardness , of intimacy , so strongly connected with 
 the substantialist intuition claims to explain well - defined , scientific phenomena , the 
 practice of scientific objectivity entails that one  must constantly denounce this claim to 
 inner depth. 
  such denunciation and detachment corresponded on an individual level to the 
 large - scale 
epistemic ruptures bachelard described in the history of science . 
 fundamentally , it hinged on a 
but if the image of mental interiority is itself a derivative of history , not a 
 universal of the mind , meynert s work can be seen as both part of the historical project of 
 anatomical science to elaborate the brain and an extension of the material 
 imagination to  catch the mind from inside .
that meynert was only partly successful in this undertaking is equally important . towards 
 the end of his career and especially after his death , former colleagues voiced suspicion 
 concerning his methods and models .
fantastic constructions. 
  others wondered whether his emphasis on dissection might have a harmful influence by 
 distracting psychiatrists from their clinical duties . 
 
finally , perhaps the most barbed critique was encapsulated in the smear word , 
  neuromythology  [ hirnmythologie ] . 
  according to many , that was the essence of meynert s professed anatomical teaching . 
 where he pretended to science , he tended toward myth .
such an apparent failure of meynert s project , however , underscores the question why his 
 research was effective in the first place .
if anything , it exposes all the more the 
 historical contingency of his theory of brain function and its circumscribed salience .
and 
 yet , some of the basic elements of that theory , mythological or not , have of late found new 
 credence in the forms of neurological connectionism , 
connectomics. 
  while that potential relationship between meynert s model of the brain and the 
 present falls outside the scope of this paper , it remains instructive to consider how his 
 theory could arouse such antipathy and yet command renewed respect .
part of the answer , i 
 argue , lies in his rhetorical - anatomical imagination  specifically his material images of 
 the brain s depth and mind s interiority .
perhaps we can not get away from this material language of bundles and paths . some sort of 
 connecting threads , weaving an  inner and  outer , some image of deep roots holding 
 together an 
upper and  lower : they have become part of our very concepts about how 
 concepts work . 
  as meynert delineated the fibres and imagined their paths with these material 
 images , he was said to have  en - souled the brain , or conversely , to have 
em - brained the 
 soul. 
  either way , he animated the one as much as he substantiated the other , and no more 
 by  mere anatomy than by 
 material - discursive 
 circuit 
  belonging at once to science and the imagination .
 the austrian psychiatrist theodor meynert s anatomical theories of the brain and nerves 
 are laden with metaphorical imagery , ranging from the colonies of empire to the tentacles 
 of jellyfish . 
 this paper analyses among meynert s earliest works a different set of less 
 obvious metaphors , namely , the fibres , threads , branches and paths used to elaborate the 
 brain s interior . 
 i argue that these metaphors of material , or what the philosopher gaston 
 bachelard called  material images , helped meynert not only to imaginatively extend the 
 tracts of fibrous tissue inside the brain but to insinuate their function as pathways 
 co - extensive with the mind . above all , with reference to bachelard s study of the material 
 imagination , i argue that meynert helped entrench the historical intuition that the mind , 
 whatever it was , consisted of some interiority  one which came to be increasingly 
 articulated through the fibrous confines of the brain . 
Meynert, Anatomist and Psychiatrist
Connecting Fibre-Systems
Anatomy of the Cortex
Meynerts Case Study
Bachelards Material Imagination
Conclusion