Otto Kalischer (1869 – 1942) was a German anatomist and neurologist.
Life
He was born on April 23, 1869 in what was then Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia. He was the son of physician Adolf Kalischer (1833–1893) and his wife Clara née Franck, (1833-after 1921). He had brother Georg (1873–1938) and sister Else. His cousin Siegfried Kalischer (1862–1954) was neurologist too.
He studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau and wrote his doctoral dissertation "Über die Nierenveränderungen bei Scharlach" in 1891. Afterwards he was active as Assistantarzt (resident) in Hanau. From 1895 he worked in Anatomischen Institut in Berlin under Heinrich Wilhelm Waldeyer (1836–1921).
According to the Gedenkbuch published by the German Federal Archies, Otto Kalischer perished in Berlin on August 14, 1942, by his own hand.
Research and controversy
In 1900, Kalischer published a monograph "Die Urogenitalmuskulatur des Dammes mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Harnblasenverschlusses" ("The urogenital musculature of the perineum with special regards to the closure of the urinary bladder"). He undertook very careful anatomical investigation of urogenital muscles by means of continuous serial sections, and described these structures in great detail. He stated, that the internal sphincter consists of trigonal muscle and no detrusor urinae muscle. Kalischer coined the term musculus sphincter urogenitalis for the skeletal urethral sphincter and introduced the concept of the trigonal sphincter (the extension of the deep trigone). His work is cited even today in medical publications.
Between 1900 and 1905, he published series of works on the neuroanatomy of birds. He searched for brain sites related to avian vocal behavior and performed both left and bilateral hemisphere lesions on sixty Amazon parrots. He placed these lesions on the lateral surface of the brain, an area that he thought would be homologous to the temporal lobe (and Broca area) of humans. In following stimulation experiments he observed the movements of legs, jaw, and eyelids. It has been estimated retrospectively, that Kalischer’s lesions probably damaged both robust nucleus of archistriatum (RA) and the hyperstriatum ventrale, pars caudalis (HVc). Kalischer postulated a pyramidal tract in birds. He was also among the first to prove that striatal rather than cortical areas are involved in avian intelligence
During his career, he collaborated with Max Lewandowsky (1876–1918) (they wrote together a report of the disappearance of contralateral thermosensitivity after spinal cord hemisection in the dog), Louis Jacobsohn-Lask (1863–1941) and Max Rothmann (1868–1915). In 1919 he wrote obituary essay for prematurely deceased Lewandowsky.
During the February 21, 1907 meeting of the Physical-Mathematical Section of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Kalischer reported some experiments which he had carried on for the purpose of testing the relation between the temporal cortex and tone-perception in dogs. He purposed particularly to test experimentally the earlier conclusion of Hermann Munk regarding the function of this area. Munk proved that the canine centre for tone is placed in the temporal lobe and perception of the high tones is conditioned by the function of the anterior part of the centre, while that of the deeper tones depends on the activity of the posterior region. Kalischer trained his dogs to take food upon the sounding of a given tone and to refrain from seizing it upon the sounding of any other. The food was either held in the experimenter's hand before the dog or laid on a chair by which the experimenter stood. The tones were sounded first on the organ used by Munk, which contained nine pipes, the octaves from C1 to c7. Later he substituted the piano and still later the harmonium, finding the latter best suited to his purposes. The daily tests on each animal were arranged about as follows: Kalischer struck a certain tone and as long as it sounded fed the animal bits of meat from the hand. In the first two daily experiments he sounded only the one food-tone, so that he might accustom the animal to being fed at the sound. The daily test on each animal lasted not longer than five or six minutes.