Between Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Warsaw: four Polish physicians in the transnational making of modern neurology

Modern neurology emerged through the circulation of clinicians, methods, concepts, and institutional models across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This historical narrative review examines Józef Babiński (1857-1932), Edward Flatau (1868-1932), Józef Brudziński (1874-1917), and Władysław Sterling (1877-1943) as four selected case studies in that process. Drawing on published primary texts, contemporary accounts, biographical scholarship, and modern historiography, we argue that their contributions are better understood as products of transnational scientific networks than as isolated national achievements. Babiński transformed bedside neurological semiology in Paris and extended it from the plantar response to cerebellar signs and anosognosia. Flatau combined medical training in Moscow with neuroanatomical work in Berlin before helping to build neurological research and clinical institutions in Warsaw. Brudziński joined pediatrics, bedside examination, experimental physiology, hospital organization, and university building. Sterling, trained in Warsaw, Berlin, Munich, and Paris, contributed with Flatau to the early conceptual history of torsion dystonia and heredity. Their careers also reveal how partitions, migration, institutional settings, war, and political violence shaped scientific opportunity and historical memory. The uneven persistence of their eponyms illustrates how neurological credit can preserve individual names while obscuring collaborative and transnational origins.