Georg Monrad-Krohn, the distinguished Norwegian neurologist, was born in Bergen. His great-grandfather, Lars Monrad, was town physician of the city from 1787 to 1829, and both his grandfather and his father, Hjalmar Monrad-Krohn, practised there as apothecaries. His mother, Alette Wilhelmine Dahl, came from Nordfjord, a coastal district to the north of Bergen. While still a student he was awarded the Oslo University gold medal for a paper on the conduction of heart impulses.
In 1912 he came to the National Hospital, Queen Square, where he worked with Horsley, Farquhar Buzzard, Batten, Collier, Grainger Stewart and Kinnier Wilson, and began his many visits to the clinics of Déjerine, Pierre Marie, Babinski and Souques at the Salpêtrière and Pitié Hospitals in Paris before returning to Oslo in 1917 to become physician to the Neurological Clinic. Five years later he was appointed professor of neurology at the University, and was soon recognised as a leading researcher and an inspiring teacher.
He made many contributions to the then growing knowledge of neurology, among them on the various forms of facial innervation and their types of paralysis, the forms of language and the problems of aphasia, and the peculiar affection of the distal branches of the facial nerve in leprosy. His Clinical examination of the nervous system (1914) established an international fame for him as a neurologist. The first English edition appeared in 1921 and it was subsequently translated into French, Spanish and German.
In his later years he had a particular interest in the blind, and postulated that they must have a complex warning apparatus in their distance appreciation of objects in a cochleo-cutaneous reflex with a homolateral localisation. Such interests led him to become a founder member of the Norwegian Neurological Association in 1920 and of the Scandinavian Neurological Society in 1922.
Monrad-Krohn was, therefore, worthy of his many honours. He was a Commander of the Royal Order of St. Olav, an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Danish Dannebrogsorden and the Swedish Nordstjerneorden. On several occasions he was honorary president of the International and Scandinavian Neurological Congresses, and he was an honorary member of many neurological and medical societies.
In 1906 he married Amanda Maria Amalia, daughter of Gustav Gronquist, of Smaland. They had three sons and three daughters.
Richard R Trail
[Arch. Neurol. (Chicago), 1965, 13, 104-05; Int. J. Neurol. (Montevideo), 1964, 3, 665-72 (p); Nord. Med., 1965, 73, 565-7; T. norske Laegeforen., 1964, 84, 397-9, 477-94, bibl.]