Foreword
In the past few years, the field of the History of the Neurosciences has gained academic recognition in France. Thanks to several important contributors, a programme was initiated, funded by the Ministry in charge of Research and a Symposium on this important topic is to be held in Paris, on next September. In the recent period, several meetings were organised in Paris and elsewhere in France on a variety of subjects of historical interest, among which ‘The Marseilles school of neurophysiology’, ‘The Marey Institute’1, ‘Sir Charles Sherrington’, ‘Epistemology of the neurosciences’, ‘18th-century brain sciences’, etc. In the present issue, we are glad to publish some recent studies in the same general line, written by professional or amateur neuroscience historians from France, Germany, England, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States. Topics cover researches from torpedo's fluid in Antiquity to mid-20th-century neurophysiology. We warmly thank all contributors to this volume, namely Cornelius Borck (McGill Faculty of Medicine, Montreal, Canada), Céline Cherici (UMR CNRS 7596, France), Armelle Debru (Université René-Descartes, Paris, France), Sven Dierig (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, Germany), Jean-Claude Dupont (Université d'Amiens, France), Gabriel Finkelstein (University of Colorado, Denver, United States), Yves Galifret (Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Paris, France), Pierre Karli (Université Louis-Pasteur, Strasbourg, France), Yves Laporte (Collège de France, Paris), Jean-Claude Lecas (Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Paris, France), Marc Jeannerod (Université de Lyon, France), Marco Piccolino (Università di Ferrara, Italy), Tilli Tansey (Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom), and Mario Wiesendanger (Fribourg Institute of Physiology, Switzerland) for their expert contributions. Their presentations attest a kind of worldwide renewal of interest in the history of the neurosciences. We hope that the wide scope of subjects will illustrate the vividness of this field.
1 A 2006 issue of Comptes rendus Palevol is devoted to É.-J. Marey's death centennial [J.-P. Gasc, S. Renous, A. de Ricqlès (Eds.), One hundred years after Marey: some aspects of Functional Morphology today, C. R. Palevol 5 (3–4) (2006)].