ABSTRACT
In July 1929 there appeared in Archiv fur Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten the paper “Uber das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen” by Hans Berger, who was a member of the editorial board of this leading German journal for psychiatry founded by Wilhelm Griesinger, in addition to being director of the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Jena. In this paper Berger reported about a long series of trials on animals and humans to record electric currents in the brain. The end result was a typical curve graph of continuously rhythmical current fluctuations in the brain, for which he wanted to propose the name “Elektrenkephalogramm.” Berger also wrote so-called “Reflexionen” about the electroencephalogram, which have survived mainly from the years 1928 until 1930. This material consists of many thousands of loose, mostly dated sheets, and the great majority of them are likewise preserved among the Berger papers at the Neurological Universitatsklinik in Freiburg.
