Otto Kalischer


Otto Kalischer was a German anatomist and neurologist.

Life

He was born on April 23, 1869 in what was then Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia. He was the son of physician Adolf Kalischer and his wife Clara née Franck,. He had brother Georg and sister Else. His cousin Siegfried Kalischer was neurologist too.
He studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau and wrote his doctoral dissertation "Über die Nierenveränderungen bei Scharlach" in 1891. Afterwards he was active as Assistantarzt in Hanau. From 1895 he worked in Anatomischen Institut in Berlin under Heinrich Wilhelm Waldeyer.
According to the Gedenkbuch published by the German Federal Archies, Otto Kalischer perished in Berlin on August 14, 1942, by his own hand.

Research and controversy

In 1900, Kalischer published a monograph "Die Urogenitalmuskulatur des Dammes mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Harnblasenverschlusses". He undertook very careful anatomical investigation of urogenital muscles by means of continuous serial sections, and described these structures in great detail. He stated, that the Internal [sphincter muscle of urethra|internal sphincter] consists of trigonal muscle and no detrusor urinae muscle. Kalischer coined the term musculus sphincter urogenitalis for the skeletal urethral sphincter and introduced the concept of the trigonal sphincter. His work is cited even today in medical publications.
Between 1900 and 1905, he published series of works on the neuroanatomy of birds. He searched for brain sites related to avian vocal behavior and performed both left and bilateral hemisphere lesions on sixty Amazon parrots. He placed these lesions on the lateral surface of the brain, an area that he thought would be homologous to the temporal lobe of humans. In following stimulation experiments he observed the movements of legs, jaw, and eyelids. It has been estimated retrospectively, that Kalischer’s lesions probably damaged both robust nucleus of archistriatum and the hyperstriatum ventrale, pars caudalis. Kalischer postulated a pyramidal tract in birds. He was also among the first to prove that striatal rather than cortical areas are involved in avian intelligence
During his career, he collaborated with Max Lewandowsky , Louis Jacobsohn-Lask and Max Rothmann. In 1919 he wrote obituary essay for prematurely deceased Lewandowsky.
During the February 21, 1907 meeting of the Physical-Mathematical Section of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Kalischer reported some experiments which he had carried on for the purpose of testing the relation between the temporal cortex and tone-perception in dogs. He purposed particularly to test experimentally the earlier conclusion of Hermann Munk regarding the function of this area. Munk proved that the canine centre for tone is placed in the temporal lobe and perception of the high tones is conditioned by the function of the anterior part of the centre, while that of the deeper tones depends on the activity of the posterior region. Kalischer trained his dogs to take food upon the sounding of a given tone and to refrain from seizing it upon the sounding of any other. The food was either held in the experimenter's hand before the dog or laid on a chair by which the experimenter stood. The tones were sounded first on the organ used by Munk, which contained nine pipes, the octaves from C1 to c7. Later he substituted the piano and still later the harmonium, finding the latter best suited to his purposes. The daily tests on each animal were arranged about as follows: Kalischer struck a certain tone and as long as it sounded fed the animal bits of meat from the hand. In the first two daily experiments he sounded only the one food-tone, so that he might accustom the animal to being fed at the sound. The daily test on each animal lasted not longer than five or six minutes.
Kalischer attempted two control-tests. He made some of his dogs temporarily blind, by sewing their eyelids together and reported, that the accuracy of discrimination was not affected. He also destroyed one cochlea in some other "well-trained dogs", and also reported no disturbance. When the other cochlea was destroyed, all discrimination ceased. Dogs subjected to extirpation of both cochlea before any training was attempted did not learn to discriminate at all. Kalischer regarded this as evidence that the other dogs had ignored extraauditory stimuli.
Harry Miles Johnson in 1913 criticised Kalischer's procedure for the design of experiment and incomplete data presented. He wrote:
"Kalischer does not tell us how many trials he gave the animals at each daily test, nor how many trials altogether were required to achieve perfection. Data on both of these questions are highly desirable in reports of behavior experiments It would have been much better if Kalischer had applied some form of control tests with the experimenter and others as well out of the room".

The heaviest criticism came from George Windholz in 1993. He stated that Kalischer was evidently influenced by the research of the Pavlovians on the conditioned reflex method. He cited Maiorov who maintained that Kalischer and Georg Friedrich Nicolai were coworkers. He summarized his article as follows:
"When Kalischer initially described the Dressur method he, by failing to refer to the work of Graber, Lubbock, Thorndike, and Himstedt, assigned to himself the priority for the discovery of the discrimination method. e should have acknowledged that the sensory discrimination method had been used by fellow German scientists Graber and Himstedt. Apparently Kalischer convinced himself of having discovered a new sensory discrimination method, the Dressur. Kalischer might have been so impressed by his presumed discovery that he became insensitive to the need to acknowledge the work of other researchers who contributed to the discovery of discrimination. Kalischer must have blinded himself by his desire for priority in the discovery of this method. However, even given the murky situation with respect to discrimination, it becomes obvious that priority does not go to Kalischer. Rather, in our view, priority should be awarded to Graber, who outlined the sensory discrimination experimental design, and to Thorndike, who followed this design".

Firkin and Whitworth in Dictionary of medical eponyms incorrectly attribute one of the first descriptions of Sturge-Weber disease to Otto Kalischer; however, it was Siegfried Kalischer, Otto's cousin, who described the pathology of this disease in 1899.

Works

  • "Über die Nierenveränderungen bei Scharlach "
  • "Über die Nerven der Harnblase, des Uterus und der Vagina ". Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 37/38 p. 947—950
  • "Ueber den normalen und pathologischen Zehen-Reflex ". Virchow Arch. f. pathologische Anat. u. Physiol 155, p. 486-506
  • "Die Urogenitalmuskulatur des Dammes mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Harnblasenverschlusses ". S. Karger, Berlin 1900
  • "Weitere Mittheilungen zur Großhirnextirpation bei Papageien ". Fortschritte der Med 18, 641-644. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 26: 421
  • "Ueber Großhirnextirpationen bei Papageien ". Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 34, p. 722-726
  • "Weitere Mittheilung zur Grosshirnlocalisation bei den Vögeln ". Berlin Kön-preuss. Akad. d. Wissensch 12 pp.
  • "Das Grosshirn der Papageien in anatomischer und physiologischer Beziehung ". Preuss Akad Wiss Berl Berlin 1905, 4°, 105 pp.
  • "Zur Funktion des Schläfenlappens des Grosshirns. Eine neue Hörprüfungsmethode bei Hunden; zugleich ein Beitrag zur Dressur als physiologischer Untrsuchungsmethode ". Sitzungsberichte d Kgl Akad d Wissenschaft X
  • Kalischer O, Lewandowsky M. "Über die Anwendung der Dressurmethode zur Bestimmung der Leitung im Rückenmark. ". Zentralbl f. Physiol. Äl 21
  • "Weitere Mitteilungen über die Ergebnisse der Dressur als physiologische Untersuchungsmethode auf dem Gebiete des Gehör-, Geschmack- und Farbessinns ". Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie. Physiol. Abteilung
  • "Über die Bedeutung des Stirnteils des Grosshirns für die Fresstondressur ". Zbl Physiol 24, 716–718
  • "Experimentelle Physiologie des Großhirns ". Handbuch der Neurologie, vol. 1 Berlin, J. Springer, 1911, pp. 365–416
  • "Über die Bedeutung der Dressurmethode für die Erforschung des Nervensystems ". J Neurol
  • "Über die Tondressur der Affen ". Zentralblatt für Physiologie 26, 255-265
  • "Dem Andenken an Ernst Weber ". Klinische Wochenschrift 4, 10, s. 479