Siegmund Exner-Ewarten

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Siegmund Exner
Siegmund Exner

Siegmund Exner , from 1917 Siegmund Ritter Exner von Ewarten , (born April 5, 1846 in Vienna , † February 5, 1926 there ) was an important Austrian physiologist. Further names are Sigmund Exner , Siegmund Exner-Ewarten and Sigmund Exner Ritter von Ewarten .

biography

Siegmund Exner was born in Vienna in 1846 as the fourth of six children of the philosophy professor and school reformer Franz Serafin Exner and Charlotte Dusensy. His brothers Adolf Exner , Karl Exner and Franz Serafin Exner became, like himself, later well-known professors, his sister Marie Exner , married to Anton von Frisch . Marie Frisch-Exner and her brother Adolf Exner had a long friendship with Gottfried Keller , as well as with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Ricarda Huch . Her son Karl von Frisch was a zoologist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine.

Siegmund Exner attended the Academic Gymnasium, studied medicine in 1865 first in Vienna under Ernst Brücke (1819-1892), from 1867 to 1868 in Heidelberg under Hermann von Helmholtz .

In 1870 he received his doctorate in medicine and was initially an assistant, in 1871 a private lecturer and in 1875 an associate professor at the Physiological Institute in Vienna. At the Physiological Institute of Franz Brücke, Sigmund Freud met Sigmund Exner and the neurologist Josef Breuer , who were to have a major influence on him. In 1884 Exner-Ewarten was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

In 1891 he was appointed to the professorship for physiology at the University of Vienna as the successor to Brücke . In 1897 he was appointed Imperial Councilor. He was the director of the Institute for Physiology at the University of Vienna until 1917. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Leipzig (1909) and Athens.

Exner also headed the Phonogram Archive Commission of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, the aim of which was, among other things, "to make the phonographic writing legible and to carry out an analysis of the speech sounds that could serve as a basis for further linguistic investigations."

From 1910 he was President of the Society of Doctors in Vienna . In 1917 he was ennobled tax-free to Knight Exner von Ewarten on the occasion of his retirement, also because of his services to medical / physiological classes .

Siegmund Exner's marriage with Emilie nee von Winiwarter (1847–1909) had two children, the surgeon and university professor Alfred von Exner-Ewarten in 1875 and the meteorologist and university professor Felix Maria von Exner-Ewarten in 1876 .

Siegmund Exner-Ewarten's grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery

After his death, Exner was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery (Group 17 D) in an honorary grave.

research

Siegmund Exner is considered to be one of the fathers of comparative physiology, brain research and perceptual psychology from a physiological point of view. One of his main areas of work was sensory physiology with studies of olfactory organs, the sensitivity of retinal regeneration, color contrast and the vision of the compound eyes . His work on the localization of behavioral functions in the brain, especially his work on the functional architecture of the visual cortex, was of particular importance.

There are also studies on the organization of the associative connections in the brain. As early as 1894 he published a "draft for a physiological explanation of psychological phenomena" with the concepts of a neural network and local learning rules in parallel processing nerve networks. He concluded early on that thinking and consciousness must be functions of the brain's network architecture. Today it can be seen as remarkable and innovative that at a time when the functioning of the brain was essentially still in the dark, he already formulated local learning rules in parallel processing nerve networks in his publications.

Exner's work also influenced the cultural and artistic horizon of Vienna. In addition to a study of the iconographic representability of floating figures, Siegmund Exner, along with Franz Scheirl and Josef Pommer, was one of the initiators and founders of the phonogram archive of the Academy of Sciences.

The 2004 re-edition “About the hovering of the birds of prey” combines the physiologist's astonishment at the wonders of nature and human art.

Fonts (selection)

swell

Eponyms (obsolete - formerly associated with Siegmund Exner)

  • External body - histology: small spaces filled with fluid and eosinophilic membrane material
  • External area - circumscribed brain region above Broca's area and anterior to the precentral motor cortex
  • External nerve - nerve running from the pharyngeal plexus to the cricothyroid membrane
  • External plexus - a network of superficial tangential fibers in the molecular layer of the cerebral cortex

Web links

Commons : Siegmund Exner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ From the negotiations of the 85th meeting of German naturalists and doctors in Vienna. International clinical review / Vienna clinical review , year 1914, p. 151 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / klr
  2. Notes. Wiener Medical Wochenschrift , year 1917, p. 1779 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wmw
  3. Daily news. In:  Tages-Post , September 26, 1917, p. 2 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / tpt