Ueber familiäre Formen von cerebralen Diplegien.

A PRESENTATION COPY OF AN EARLY NEUROLOGICAL WORK.

Original offprint. 8vo (230 x 160mm). 10 pp. Original self-wrappers (extremities slightly rubbed, fore edge of front wrapper lightly spotted, faint central horizontal crease, otherwise a very good copy). Leipzig, Veit & Comp, “Neurologisches Centralblatt”.

A presentation copy, inscribed by the author "Herrn Dozent Dr J. Zappert d. Verf" in black ink to the front wrapper. The recipient, Professor Julius Zappert (1867-1941), was a highly regarded Viennese paediatrician and neurologist. A member of the Vienna Society for Psychology and Neurology, Zappert ranked alongside Freud as amongst the founders of childhood neurology in Germany. In 1898 Zappert was appointed head of the department for childhood nervous diseases at the Institut Max-Kassowitz in Vienna, a position that Freud had held from 1886 to 1896. He would continue his work in child neurology as the founding-director of the celebrated Kinderspital der Israelischen Kultusgemeinde in 1918, before emigrating from Vienna to England in 1938, the same year as Freud.

The first separate appearance of Freud's article "On familiar forms of cerebral diplegias", being an offprint from the journal Neurologisches Centralblatt, comprised of an account of two brothers who suffered from an unusual hereditary neurological affliction closely resembling disseminated sclerosis. Although Freud's productive early career work in neurology has been somewhat eclipsed by the sheer scale of his pioneering contributions to psychiatry, his contributions to the field of child neurology were well recognised in his time. "Freud’s major neurological publications after 1890 came at a time when he was already laying the foundations of modern psychiatry with the classic monographs, Studies on Hysteria (1893), in collaboration with Josef Breuer (1842–1925), and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)" (Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences). His work on child neurology in general, and cerebral palsy in particular, "solidified his belief that many neurological and psychiatric disorders cannot be firmly localised to a specific area of the cerebral cortex. The foundation was thus set for his broad and speculative theory of psychoanalysis, a theoretical construct of the mind that has little correlation with the brain’s anatomic pathology" (op cit).

Rare. OCLC list only one copy, held by the Library of Congress. RareBookHub / ABPC list no copies to have appeared at auction.

Grinstein, Sigmund Freud's Writings: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 19. 

Stock Code: 231892