Nervous System.
Stein at John’s Hopkins:
The Earliest Citation of Her Work
[Stein, Gertrude]. The Nervous System. And its constituent neurones. Designed for the use of practitioners of medicine and of students of medicine and psychology. By Lewellys F. Barker, M.B., Tor. With two colored plates and six hundred and seventy-six illustrations in the text. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899.
8vo.; ownership signature dated December 1945 on front endpaper; ex-libris on front pastedown; green cloth; stamped in gilt on spine; extremities and spine gently frayed. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of the first English-language medical textbook on the nervous system, written by one of Stein’s favorite professors at Johns Hopkins University and including a summary of her research on “the nucleus of Darkschewitsch” on pages 725-26. Number of copies unknown, but likely the run was small in keeping with its audience; a second edition was published in 1901. Wilson B1.
Lewellys F. Barker was so impressed with Stein’s class performance that he enlisted her help in the dissection and description of the “nucleus of Darkschewitsch,” a region in the central gray matter of the upper mid-brain of an infant. As developments in neuroscience were leading toward a revised understanding of neural interaction, Stein’s research incorporated linguistics, forcing the relationship between words and their conjuctive and disjunctive properties to be reconceptualized by cognitive scientists. Stein’s background in scientific medicine and psychology is crucial to understanding the basis of her innovative writing style, and her observations, which Barker paraphrases in the chapter “Grouping and Chaining Together of Neurones,” illuminate the level of her expertise in the field.
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