Herbert Olivecrona

Axel Herbert Olivecrona (July 11, 1891 – January 1980) was a Swedish professor and brain surgeon, credited with founding the field of Swedish neurosurgery, and pioneering developments in modern neurosurgery.

Family, early life and education Herbert Olivecrona was born July 11, 1891, in Visby, Sweden, the son of Axel Olivecrona, a district court judge, and Countess Ebba Cristina Mörner af Morlanda. His brother Karl Olivecrona was a noted Swedish legal scholar, and his son Gustaf Olivecrona was a Swedish writer and journalist.

Originally attending school in Uppsala, he began studying medicine at the University of Uppsala in 1909, then transferring to Karolinska Institutet, where he was an assistant in Pathology. He graduated in 1918. After further consultation with Cushing, Olivecrona improved his skills, and in 1930 was promoted to the position of assistant surgeon in chief, allowing him to establish a 50-bed neurosurgery department. Olivecrona was a pioneer in the creation of specific surgical techniques for certain types of brain lesions such as acoustic neuromas, arteriovenous malformations, and berry aneurysms, becoming one of the key neurosurgical instructors in Europe. One of his students, Lars Leksell (1907–1986), went on to make major advances in the development of echoencephalography, and is credited with the invention of radiosurgery.

Among his most famous patients was the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, whose brain tumor he operated on in 1936. Karinthy put it into a novel titled "A Journey Round my Skull."

In 1955, Olivecrona was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He retired from the Karolinska in 1960 and went into private practice, during which time he also accepted an invitation to travel to Cairo and establish a neurosurgical unit in Egypt. He later co-wrote a neurosurgical handbook, Handbuch der Neurochirugie.

Legacy The Herbert Olivecrona Award, also known as the "Nobel Prize of Neurosurgery", is awarded annually by the Karolinska Institute to a neurosurgeon or neuroscientist who has made an outstanding contribution to the neurosurgical field.

Recipients of the Herbert Olivecrona Award by year: John F. Mullan, 1976 Charles G. Drake, 1977 M. Gazi Yaşargil, 1978 Leonard I Malis, 1979 Lindsay Symon, 1980 Charles B. Wilson, 1982 Peter J. Jannetta, 1983 Kenichiro Sugita, 1984 John A. Jane, 1985 Majid Samii, 1987 William H. Sweet, 1989 Graham Teasdale, 1991 Keiji Sano, 1992 Emil Pasztor, 1993 Alan Crockard, 1995 Vinko Dolenc, 1996 Takanori Fukushima, 1997 Michael Apuzzo, 1998 Robert F. Spetzler, 1999 Albert Rhoton Jr., 2000 Patrick J. Kelly, 2001 Nicolas de Tribolet, 2002 Matti Vapalahti, 2003 Alexander N. Konovalov, 2004 Björn Meyerson, 2005 Niels-Aage Svendgaard, 2005 Cornelius A. F. Tulleken, 2006 Ross M. Bullock, 2007 Bernard George, 2008 Michael Fehlings, 2009 Hugues Duffau (fr), 2010 Ossama al-Mefty, 2011 Andres Lozano, 2012 Marianne Juhler, 2013 Peter J.A. Hutchinson, 2015 P. David Adelson, 2016 L. Dade Lunsford, 2017 Ali Fadl Krisht, 2019

Selected works An experimental study of the circulatory failure in peritonitis (Academical treatise), 1922 Congenital arteriovenous aneurysms of the carotid and vertebral arterial systems, 1957