Cécile Vogt-Mugnier

German stamp issued in 1989 in the Women in German history series

Cecile Vogt-Mugnier (27 March 1875, Annecy – 4 May 1962, Cambridge) was a French neurologist from Haute-Savoie.

Family

She obtained her medical doctorate in Paris and was the student of Pierre Marie. There she met her future husband, Oskar Vogt, when he came to Paris to work with Joseph Jules Déjérine (and his wife, Augusta Marie Dejerine-Klumke, who collaborated with him). The Vogt couple also collaborated for a long period of time, usually with Cécile as the primary author. The Vogts had two daughters, both accomplished scientists in their own rights. Marthe Vogt (1903–2003) was a neuropharmacologist who became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Professor at Cambridge. Marguerite Vogt (1913–2007) started as a developmental geneticist working in Drosophila, then moved to the US in 1950. She developed methods to culture poliovirus with Renato Dulbecco. She was a faculty member at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where she worked on viral transformation and cellular immortalization of cancer cells.

Contributions

The contributions of the Vogts are of first order in several parts of the brain and had a considerable influence on international neurological science.

The main contribution of the Vogts was La myelocytoarchitecture du thalamus du cercopithèque from Cécile alone (1909). The great contribution of Cécile has been that the partition of the lateral region (lateral mass) should rely on the territories (the spaces occupied) of the main afferents. She distinguished from back to front the lemnical radiation and a particular nucleus, in front of it the cerebellar (prelemniscal) radiation with another nucleus and more anteriorly the "lenticular" radiation. This system still denotes today, the subdivision of the thalamus (Percheron, 1977, Percheron et al. 1996). Her paper was followed by Die Cytoarchitechtonik des Zwishenhirns de Cercothipiteken from Friedmann (1911) traducing in cytoarchitectonic terms her partition.

A paper published in common in 1941 (Thalamus studien I to III), devoted to the human thalamus, represented an important step in partitioning and naming thalamic parts. The anatomy of the thalamus from Hassler (one of their students) was published in 1959, the year of the death of Oskar. It is not known whether the master accepted the excessive partition and unnecessary complication of this work that was an atlas dedicated to stereotacticans. The paper of 1941 was much simpler.

Persondata
Name	Vogt-Mugnier, Cecile
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	March 27, 1875
Place of birth
Date of death	May 4, 1962
Place of death