Edinger, Tilly (1897–1967)

German-born American scientist, a major world figure in vertebrate paleontology, who essentially established the field of paleoneurology. Born Johanna Gabrielle Ottilie Edinger in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on November 13, 1897; died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 27, 1967; daughter of Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918, professor of neurology at the University of Frankfurt) and Anna (Goldschmidt) Edinger; sister of Friedrich (Fritz) Edinger and Dorothea (Dora) Edinger; received doctorate from University of Frankfurt, 1921; never married; no children.

Born Johanna Gabrielle Ottilie Edinger into a highly assimilated German-Jewish family of

Frankfurt am Main's wealthy Grossbürgertum (upper bourgeoisie), young Tilly enjoyed the privileges of the doomed world of pre-1914 Europe: servants, long and leisurely vacations, and a sense of security. A serious health impediment, congenital deafness, did little to rein in her curiosity. Because her parents encouraged her intellectual growth and could afford books, travel and every aspect of high culture, her path to an academic career was open if not assured. Tilly's father Ludwig Edinger, a professor of neurology at the University of Frankfurt, was a distinguished medical researcher and one of the founders of the field of comparative neurology. After his death, the city of Frankfurt am Main named a street after him. Tilly's mother Anna Edinger (1863–1929) was descended from the influential Warburg family of bankers; though she concentrated on home life, Anna was socially conscious and active in welfare work. After her death, she was honored with a bronze bust in the municipal park.

The year 1918 was particularly traumatic for the patriotic Edinger family. Ludwig died in January, and Germany was defeated in November. As good German Bürgers, none of the Edingers could then have imagined that within 15 years, because they were Jews, they would be demonized as "un-German aliens" and forced to flee their beloved homeland. But in time the horrors of modern German history would determine the course of Tilly Edinger's career and life.

An excellent student, she graduated from Frankfurt's elite Schillerschule. As a typical German university student spending semesters at several institutions—the universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and finally Frankfurt am Main—she originally intended to major in geology. Upon discovering that there were few positions for women in this field, however, she switched to zoology. When told that this field, too, was virtually closed to women, she refused to be discouraged and signed up for courses in the specialized area she had wished to study in the first place—vertebrate paleontology. Edinger received her doctorate in 1921 from the University of Frankfurt; her dissertation topic was a detailed study of the skull and cranial cavity of Nothosaurus, a long-extinct marine reptile of the Triassic era.

Soon, however, Edinger's scientific interests shifted to her late father's area of neurology. Her time was now occupied with work in paleontology, and in 1927 her growing reputation in the field was recognized when she was appointed curator of the vertebrate collection at Frankfurt's Senckenberg Museum. Her financial independence, due to her family's wealth, made it possible for her to accept this prestigious but unpaid position. Her intensive research during the 1920s made it clear that there was a need for a direct study of fossil mammal brains on the basis of casts made from their cranial cavities. Since brain tissues do not fossilize, casts of the inside of the skull make it possible for experts to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of the long-dead animal's brain structure. Up to that time, little research had been done in this field. As the quality of Edinger's scientific papers became apparent to those who read them, the importance of this new area of science for a study of the evolution of animal intelligence became apparent to the world scientific community. Within a few years, her probing and systematic work had earned her an international scientific reputation.

In 1929, Edinger published a major study of fossil brains, Die fossilen Gehirne. Just as her achievements began to bring recognition, a time of chaos and moral disintegration descended on Germany. The onset of the world economic depression (1929–30) led to a rapid deterioration of social and political stability, the most dramatic manifestation of which was the rapid growth of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement. The Nazis viewed many as foes to be extirpated, but Germany's Jews, linked in millions of minds to the suspect ideals of liberal bourgeois democracy, invariably came at the top of their list.

After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Edinger did not leave Germany. Like many German Jews, she thought of herself as a German citizen of the Jewish faith and believed—or at least hoped—that the storm would blow over. But Nazism grew more virulent with time, although for purely tactical reasons Nazi anti-Semitic policies blew alternately hot and cold. In Edinger's case, a workable modus vivendi emerged on her job. Nazi anti-Semitism was rapidly purging German public life of Jews, but she was able to retain her post of curator at the Senckenberg Museum. Although the museum's director was a Nazi, he clearly recognized Edinger's value to his institution and created a situation that made it possible for her to continue to work there for more than five years under the Hitler regime. The stratagem was one of removing her name from the door of her office, and allowing her to leave the premises whenever there were visitors. This precariously "normal" situation ended in 1938, when a heightened ferocity of the Nazi war on German Jews led to her discovery and expulsion from the museum.

Long realizing that being Jewish in Germany was a hopeless situation, Edinger had already obtained a visa to immigrate to the United States. But the waiting list was long, and by the time of the violent Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 she still could not depart from Germany. Concerned colleagues at Harvard offered her a post-graduate fellowship so that she could emigrate immediately, but the snag was that she would have to return to Germany after the fellowship's expiration and also be forced to relinquish her place in the quota. A better situation soon emerged when the Harvard Corporation offered her a tenured faculty appointment. Nevertheless, her quota number was still not due, and in May 1939 Edinger was able to leave Germany for a temporary stay in England, the basis for this being the permanent immigration status that had earlier been granted her by U.S. authorities. Her brother Friedrich (Fritz) was not as fortunate; unable to escape Nazi Germany, he died in the Holocaust.

Safe from Nazi persecution but penniless, Edinger eked out a living in London by working as a translator and living frugally. By now, war had descended on the European Continent, and she was relieved to arrive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940 to resume her scientific work. Thanks to the intercession of Alfred Sherwood Romer, director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Edinger became a research associate at the museum. Except for a year of teaching comparative zoology at Wellesley College, she would remain at the museum for the rest of her life. Research work best fitted Edinger's health situation, for she was extremely hard of hearing; as a result, classroom teaching presented its own obstacles.

For more than two decades, Edinger's work flourished at Harvard. Her studies of fossil brains, the first systematic work in the field, proved that the evolution of the brain in animals should be studied directly from fossils rather than from a hierarchy of separate living species, each of which had adopted its own mode of life in modern times. A vigorous polemicist, in her publications she often attacked orthodox thinking in her field as being outmoded and just plain wrong. In her work on the horse brain, she convincingly showed that an enlarged forebrain had evolved several times, independently among advanced mammal groups, and no single evolutionary scale could be seen as embracing all of them.

Her work made a strong case for viewing brain evolution in terms of the varying ecologies and adaptations among mammals; she also provided convincing evidence of how rates and styles of change varied significantly in different lineages. In 1948, she published the results of her pathbreaking investigations in a major work, The Evolution of the Horse Brain.

Because of Edinger's pioneering work, by the 1950s paleoneurology had become one of the most exciting subdisciplines of vertebrate paleontology. Her research found recognition through fellowships awarded her by the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Foundation of University Women. Edinger was honored by her fellow scientists in 1964 when she was elected president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Other signs of the universal respect her work had earned included the honorary doctorates awarded by Wellesley College and in Germany by the universities of Giessen and Frankfurt am Main. Despite the suffering inflicted in Germany during the 1930s, including the murder of her brother, Edinger insisted on distinguishing between the good and the bad in her native country's people and culture. She remained loyal to her home city of Frankfurt am Main, visited it on several occasions and was deeply moved by the honorary degree that she received from its university in 1964.

Edinger enjoyed her postwar visits to Frankfurt, and in 1967 looked forward to another visit on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Senckenberg Museum. But her lifelong hearing difficulties proved to be a fatal handicap in the spring of that year when, unaware of its dangerous proximity, she was struck by an automobile near her home in Cambridge on May 26, 1967. She died of her injuries the following day.

To honor her, a Tilly Edinger Fund was established for the purchase of books on vertebrate paleontology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. She was remembered by Stephen Jay Gould as a major scientist with a strong personality, "feisty, strong-willed, opinionated, and warm-hearted—a most engaging, if sometimes trying, combination." Another colleague recalled her "warmth of emotion [which] would, on occasion, rouse her violently against things or persons which she disliked—notably editing and editors! But in general this emotional warmth erupted in friendship and affection, and won her hosts of friends. Typical was her spirit as a refugee. Like many in those days, she found herself here in position and finances far below the status which she had formerly enjoyed. Did Tilly complain? Far from it! She became an enthusiastic American citizen, to whom her 'Uncle Sam' was almost a living person, and her gratitude to Harvard and affection for the Museum were without bounds."

sources:

Aldrich, Michele L. "Women in Geology," in G. Kass-Simon et al., eds. Women of Science: Righting the Record. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 42–71.

Bailey, Martha J. American Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary. Denver: ABC-CLIO, 1994.

"Edinger, Tilly, Ph.D.," in Encyclopedia of American Biography. New Series, Vol. 39. NY: American Historical Society, 1969, pp. 248–250.

"Famous Horseologists—Tilly Edinger (1897–1967)," in Pony Express: Florida Fossil Horse Newsletter. Vol. 2, no. 4. December 1993, pp. 2–3.

Gould, Stephen Jay. "Edinger, Tilly," in Barbara Sicherman et al., eds. Notable American Women, The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 218–219.

Hoffer, Helmut. "In Memoriam Tilly Edinger," in Gegenbaurs Morphologisches Jahrbuch. Vol. 113, No. 2, 1969, pp. 303–313.

Lang, Harry G., and Bonnie Meath-Lang. Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Olson, Everett C. Vertebrate Paleozoology. NY: Wiley-Interscience, 1971.

Romer, Alfred Sherwood. "Tilly Edinger," in Society of Vertebrate Paleontology News Bulletin. No. 81. October 1967, pp. 51–53.

——. Vertebrate Paleontology. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

collections:

Edinger Family Papers, Leo Baeck Institute, New York City.

Tilly Edinger Papers, Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John Haag , Assistant Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia