[Egas Moniz, Wilhelm Löhr and cerebral angiography. An expedition into the discovery of the cerebral vessels].

25 years ago the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955), the founder of the cerebral angiography and Nobel Prize laureate of the year 1949, died in Lisbon. Narrow 15 years before his German partner and competitor Wilhelm Löhr (1889-1941), surgeon in Mageburg, died. Löhr was the first physician, who applied and extended the carotis angiography in Germany, to begin together with the neurologist Walter Jacobi (1889-1937). For many important reasons and informations in cerebral angioarchitectonics it is indebted to the achievement of Moniz and Löhr. On this occasion a ramble set out through the history of discovery of the brain vessels. Beginning in the antiquity (Herophilos, Galen) via the considerable anatomists in the 16th and 17th century. (Berengario, Vesal, Wepfer, Willis, Sylvius and others) to the discoveries and the specifications in the late 19th and 20th century it is shown, that in the research of cerebral vessels a change of guidance is performed in the first half of our century, from the classic morphologists of the "anatomists" at the operating table and at the X-ray screen, i.e. to the neurosurgeons, neurologists and radiologists. In this connection the present paper is not only an essay about the history of brain research but also a contribution to the history of neuroradio-diagnostics. Such excellent textbooks and atlases as Becher, Braus/Elze, Ferner/Kautzky, Krayenbühl/Yaşargil, Wolf-Heidegger and especially Ferner (1979) reflect the high level of evolution of the theoretical and applied neuroanatomy.