A Reappraisal of the Ascending Systems in Man, with Emphasis on the Medial Lemniscus

This volume of Advances in Anatomy, Embryology and Cell Biology is based on material assembled by Dr. Jaap H.R. Schoen. Jaap Schoen published his results only partially himself (see Schoen’s references in the preface of Usunoff et al. 1997). After his sudden death, due to a diving accident, Jan Voogd and Hans Feirabend of our Neuroregulation group encompassed his cerebellar results in the chapter on the cerebellum and precerebellar nuclei in Paxinos’ The Human Nervous System (Voogd et al. 1990), while Kamen Usunoff and myself grouped Schoen’s trigeminal results and presented them together with the background of the outcome of recent animal trigeminal experiments in Advances in Anatomy, Embryology and Cell Biology 136 (Usunoff et al. 1997). Jaap Schoen described his series thoroughly and worked them out in serial drawings of the most important sections. Numerous scientists have consulted this material. Together with the abstracts of the Dutch Anatomical Society and ha- ?nished descriptions of the different parts of the central nervous system for his thesis,the patternofhis resultsemerged. A large series of results are available that still have to be published. Since Jaap Schoen “was one of the few neuroanatomists to apply the Nauta method to - man material” (Voogd et al. 1990), his results are highly important for human neuroanatomy. This monograph contains part of his material. Some repetition, - pecially of ?gures, is inevitably due to the dispersed publication of Schoen’s results in various books, monographs, articles, and abstracts (see Usunoff et al. 1997).