Sven Ingvar (1889-1947) of Lund University and the Centennial of His Landmark Dissertation on Cerebellar Phylo-Ontogeny

Abstract

In January 1919, Sven Ingvar (1889-1947) defended his doctoral dissertation (required for the M.D. degree) on cerebellar phylogeny, development, and function at Lund University, Sweden. The work was supervised by Cornelius U. Ariëns Kappers (1877-1946) in Amsterdam and by Karl Petrén (1868-1927) in Lund. A physician of many interests, Ingvar became professor of Practical Medicine in his alma mater. His cerebellar papers, spanning over a decade, are the contributions that gained him international recognition in the neurological sciences. A key discovery was the demonstration, with the Marchi method, of the primary vestibulocerebellar afferent fibers. The merits of his work rest with the use of connections to compare lobes and lobules in different species, and the introduction of the idea of vestibular, spinal, and corticopontine storeys; on the other hand, based on current knowledge, one might take a more critical stance toward the proposition of a posterior lobe as a phylogenetically old structure, and the homolog of the human tonsil. Nonetheless, Ingvar was an early pioneer of the "evo-devo" synthesis (or the field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, which aims at understanding how developmental processes evolve across species). He studied the comparative anatomy of the cerebellum in over 50 species of reptiles, birds, and mammals and theorized about the spatial relations of phylogenetically older and more recent acquisitions in both the cerebellar and the thalamocortical systems.

Keywords: Cerebellum; Development; Evolution; History of neuroscience; Sven Ingvar.