Robert S. Schwab was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1904. He trained in physiology at Cambridge University before qualifying in medicine at Harvard Medical School. He went on to specialise in neurology at the Boston City and Massachusetts General Hospitals, as well as training in neuropathology at the University of Munich and psychiatry at the Boston Psychiatric Hospital.
In 1937, Schwab established and became director of the Brian Wave Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he remained until his retirement in 1968. During his tenure, Schwab established the first technical training course in electroencephalography (EEG, the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain) to be supported by the United States Public Health Service, and conducted research on a number of topics including Parkinson’s disease and the use of EEG in establishing the criteria for death.
Schwab also played a key role in the professional organisation of electroencephalography, serving as President for both the Eastern Association of Electroencephalographers and the American EEG Society and Vice-President of the International Federation of Societies for Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology. He also served as an editor of The EEG Journal throughout his career.
Schwab was married twice, first to Dorothy Schwab (d.1971) and then to Joan Sheahan. Schwab died in Boston, Massachusetts on 6 April 1972.
Date
1947 - 1948
Scope and ContentCorrespondence between William Grey Walter, of the Burden Neurological Institute, and Robert S. Schwab, of Massachusetts General Hospital and the American Electroencephalographic Society, regarding technical and clinical problems with E.E.G. equipment. Also includes discussions about the American Electroencephalographic Society and its journal.
Mary (Mollie) Agnes Burnston Brown Brazier was born in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset on 18 May 1904. She was educated at Sidcot School, Somerset and Bedford College, Bedford, before studying physiology and biochemistry at the University of London, gaining her BSc in 1926 and Ph.D. in 1930. Her first major research project, conducted at the Maudsley Hospital, London, focused on electrical changes in the skin that occur in thyroid disease. This work received great acclaim, and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Van Meter Prize of the American Association for the Study of Goitre in 1934. Following this project, Brazier became increasingly interested in the electrical activity of the human nervous system.
After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940, Brazier moved from London to the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, Massachusetts, where she took up a number of posts as a neurophysiologist in the Departments of Psychiatry, Anaesthesia, and Neurology. While her research in Boston covered a variety of subjects – including psychological selection processes, neurological injuries, and electromyography – Brazier increasingly specialised in electroencephalography (EEG, the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain), running the Hospital’s EEG Laboratory for much of the Second World War. In 1946, Brazier played a key role in persuading William Grey Walter (1910-1977), a neurophysiologist and EEG expert at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England, to come to Boston and demonstrate his new EEG frequency analyser device. The device remained in Boston, and helped to facilitate Brazier’s path-breaking computerised analyses of brainwave patterns.
In 1961, Brazier left Massachusetts to join the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she was appointed Professor of Anatomy, Physiology and Biophysics. Here, she expanded her research on the electrical activity in the brain and nervous system, specialising in the use of computing methods to evaluate patients with epilepsy for surgical treatment.
During her career, Brazier played a key role in expanding the international reach of several neuroscientific disciplines. She wrote a seminal textbook The Electrical Activity of the Nervous System in 1957, and was successively appointed Treasurer, Secretary, and finally President of the International Federation of Societies for Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology. She also wrote a number of texts on the history of neurophysiology, including A History of Neurophysiology in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1984) and A History of Neurophysiology in the 19th Century (1988). She continued writing in academic circles right up to her death, with her last essay published in the Journal for the History of the Neurosciences in 1993.
Brazier married Leslie J. Brazier, an electrical engineer, in 1928, with whom she had one son. She died in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on 14 May 1995.
The Edison and Swan Electric Light Company Limited was a manufacturer of electrical goods based in London, England. It was founded by chemist and inventor Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) on 26 October 1883.
In 1860, Swan began conducting experiments in electric lighting. After several setbacks, Swan successfully produced an incandescent electric lamp in 1878, which he patented on 27 November 1880 (Patent No. 4933). After setting up the Swan United Electric Company to commercially produce the lamp, Swan was threatened with legal action by the rival Edison Electric Light Company, who claimed infringement of the patents taken out by American inventor and scientist Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Instead of going to trial, the two companies agreed to merge, becoming the Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company Limited in 1883. By combining forces, the Company was able to suppress competition in Britain and dominate the market with their ‘Ediswan’ light bulbs, produced in factories in Sunderland, Brimsdown, and Ponders End.
In the early twentieth-century, the company expanded beyond light bulbs, opening the country’s first radio valve factory in 1916 and beginning the production of vacuum cleaners in 1924. In following years, Edison and Swan factories also produced radio sets, car batteries, cathode ray tubes, and electric cables. During the Second World War, the company assisted researchers at the Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol, in their production of equipment for electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and electroencephalography (EEG).
In 1957, the Edison and Swan Electric Company was amalgamated with Siemens Brothers and Company within the Associated Electrical Industries Group (AEI) to form Siemens Edison Swan Limited. Siemens Edison Swan light bulbs were also produced under the Mazda (General Electric) brand licence.
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