Geschlecht, „Rasse“ und Gehirn: Vergleichende hirnanatomische Forschung am Neurologischen Institut in Wien um 1900

In 1882 Heinrich Obersteiner (1847–1922) founded the first designated interdisciplinary laboratory for brain science, the Neurological Institute Vienna.

logical institutes worldwide. In times, when neuroanatomy was a novel field, the functionality of the brain was still largely disputed. Within these neuroanatomical and neurophysiological discourses, differences of brains of different sexes or races were debated. At the Neurological Institute in Vienna, two Jewish researchers, Emil Zuckerkandl (1849–1910) and Johann Paul Karplus (1866–1936), attempted to challenge widespread doctrines of apparent sexual and racial differences. In this paper I contextualise these hitherto neglected studies of these scholars and assess their critical potential, to shed new light on medical discourses on race and sex. I focus on the reconstruction of research undertaken at the Neurological Institute Vienna and analyse the institutional conditions of its publication. Key for the argument is the dissemination of these anatomical studies to a wider audience, transgressing the narrow circle of a specialised scientific community. After tracing the genesis of narratives of European superiority, the historical reconstruction of debates on race and sex in brain science is relevant today, if we consider similar controversies in contemporary neuroscience.