Baron Constantin Economo von San Serff (1876-1931) and his encephalitis: war fighter pilot, neuroscientist, and the greatest medical mystery of the 20th century
Abstract
Constantin Economo was born in 1876, into a rich Greek patrician family in the city of Brãila, Romania. His father was a merchant with extensive properties in Thessaly and Macedonia, where in the city of Edessa his family was rooted; Economo's ancestors included several bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church.
In 1877, the family moved to Trieste where Economo spent his childhood and youth. After his school-leaving exam in 1893, he started to study at the Polytechnic University of Vienna at the request of his father, but switched to medicine after two years.
While still studying, he published his first scientific paper on the development of the pituitary gland in birds. He graduated in 1901, by which time he had already worked in professor Exner's laboratory for one year, where he stayed until 1903.
He spent the following year as a resident at the Clinic of Internal Medicine under professor Nothnagel; subsequently, he travelled for two years visiting European clinics and laboratories, where he worked with Joffroy, Magnan, Marie, Bernheim, Kraepelin, Ziehen, and Oppenheim, to name only a few. In 1906, Economo's father was ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph I and received the hereditary title "Freiherr", making Constantin a baron, too.
Since 1907 he worked as an assistant at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases headed by professor Wagner-Jauregg at Vienna's General Hospital. He obtained his habilitation in 1913 with a thesis on sensory disorders accompanying pontine tumours.
He was appointed professor of neurology and psychiatry in 1921. In 1931, he was made head of a newly established department of brain research (nowadays known as Neurologische Institut) at Vienna University which he headed for six months only.
During his career in neuroscience, he mainly dealt with three topics which became his lasting professional legacy: epidemic encephalitis which was later called by his name; sleep disorders and localization of the sleep centres; and cytoarchitectonics of the cerebral cortex. Another one of Constantin von Economo's passions (apparently as great as medicine) was aeronautics.
While in Paris, he learned how to fly a balloon. After returning to Vienna, he started flying frequently at the old Viennese airfield in Aspern.
He was a holder of the first official Austro-Hungarian international pilot licence, and since 1910 the president of the Austrian Aeroclub, remaining in office until 1926. During the First World War, he was a fighter pilot for the Austro-Hungarian air force during two campaigns in the years 1915 and 1916 on the Dolomite front.
At the request of his parents with the Ministry of Aviation, he was demobilized in late 1916 and summoned back to the Vienna Military Hospital to care for patients with head injuries. In 1919, at the age of 43, he married Karoline, a daughter of prince Alois von Schönburg-Hartenstein; the couple had no children of the marriage.
Constantin von Economo died in 1931, aged 55, of the sequelae of a heart attack.