Adolf Beck (1863-1942) - A Pioneer of Electroencephalography

keys. Electrodes were placed on the skull to record the changes in the electric potential. [4]. In this way, they in- validated William Horsley’s notion that these changes re-flected the activity of muscles of the skull. By further anal-yses of potential changes, they mapped out sensitive re-gions of the cerebral cortex. They also showed that the Adolf Beck was born on January 1, 1863, in Krakow, in what then was Polish territory of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. His parents were Jewish; what we know about his father Szai Beck is that he was an impecunious crafts-man. Having graduated from a gymnasium in 1883, Beck took up his medical studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 1886, while still a student, he started to work in the Department of Physiology headed by Napo-leon Cybulski (1854–1919), who was also Dean of the Medical Faculty at that time. His first publication, with Cybulski, was ‘Researches on the sense of taste in a tongue-less human being’ [1] . Beck studied the nervous system and established that nerves have the same sensitivity and potential for electrical response throughout their length. He gained a university prize with a paper on the excitabil-ity of a nerve, later published under the title ‘On the excit-ability of a nerve at different points’ [2]. He graduated in medicine in 1889 and was subsequently offered a position at the Physiological Institute. In 1890, he obtained a doc-torate with a thesis on localization in the brain and spinal cord by means of electrical phenomena [3] , with special emphasis on distinguishing functional centers in the brain through recording electrical activity after periph-eral stimulation. His numerous contributions were pub-lished in German and in Polish.Under Cybulski’s supervision, Beck continued his pio- neer studies on the activity of the cerebral cortex in re-sponse to peripheral nerve stimulation in dogs and mon-