The Swiss connection of Augusta Déjerine-Klumpke

The C7 form of brachial plexus paralysis is still known today as the Klumpke variant, however, it is not widely known that this description was made by the 27-year-old Augusta Klumpke. She was already famous in Paris for being the first woman to become externe (at 23 years of age) and interne des Hôpitaux (at 26), despite strong opposition by a large group, including her own mentor Alfred Vulpian. Two years after her paper on the brachial plexus, Augusta Klumpke (1859–1927) married a young Swiss-born neurologist, Jules Déjerine (1849–1917), who would become Jean-Martin Charcot’s second successor at La Salpêtrière. This marriage was not Augusta’s only link to Switzerland. At the age of 14, in 1873, she had arrived in Clarens/ Montreux, on Lake Geneva from her native San Francisco after a stay in Germany, with her mother, sisters and brother. She quickly moved to Lausanne for reasons of schooling, and an analysis of the documents available from the local archives shows that she was already unusually active compared to her classmates. She even became president of a girl’s cultural association, “La Perseveranza”, and was deemed to be too “liberal” by the local bourgeoisie in Lausanne, as emphasised in 1941 by the Lausanne neurologist and 11th president of the Swiss Society of Neurology Hermann Brunnschweiler at the 49th assembly of the society. This culminated when her application to attend courses at the Lausanne Academy for obtaining the baccalauréat was turned down by the Vaudois authorities on 27th April 1876, because she was a girl. This triggered her decision to leave for Paris a few months later, where she immediately embarked on her medical studies. Later, the Déjerine couple rented and subsquently bought a chalet close to Berne, at the Thalgut on the Aar, where each year Augusta used to spend two and a half months with her daughter, the future neurologist Yvonne SorrelDéjerine, while Jules Déjerine, who stayed only 4 to 6 weeks, would spend his vacation fishing and meeting friends, such as the neuropsychiatrist Paul Dubois from Berne, whom he had met in Geneva at Collège Calvin as a boy, and who had become the second president of the Swiss Society of Neurology (1910–1916). In contrast to Jules Déjerine, who became doctor honoris causa in Geneva for the University’s 350-year Jubilé in 1909, along with Marie Curie, Yvan Pavlov and Camillo Golgi, Augusta was never officially honoured in Switzerland, not even in Lausanne, despite her adolescence roots and her being a neurological celebrity in France, becoming the first woman to be elected president of the Société de Neurologie de Paris in 1914. However, in her obituary, two prominent Swiss neurologists, Édouard Long from Geneva, and Gustave Roussy (who had become a French citizen) underlined Augusta’s deep and continued relationships with Switzerland.