Bernstein's rejection of Braune and Fischer: Studies on the physiology and pathology of movements (1936)

Abstract

was to be closed and its director, Gastev, would be killed in Siberia in 1938 (Bongaardt, 1996; Bongaardt & Meijer, in press). Since the beginning of his ca-reer, Bernstein had built networks of cooperation, and in the late 1930s he contin-ued his work without problems at the Laboratory for Biomechanics of the Central Scientific Institute of Physical Culture, later as director of the movement labora-tory of the Institute of Neurology. Bernstein's survival can be understood from both his own theoretical development and his practical involvement. In the early 1920s, Bernstein was very much under the spell of Braune and Fischer's "Der Gang des Menschen " ("Human Gait") (1895-1904), which was at the time state-of-the-art. Braune and Fischer disagreed with the Weber brothers' idea (183611894) that the human walker should exploit the free fall of the swing-ing leg. According to Braune and Fischer, there is no such thing as a free fall in normal walking because muscles are continuously controlled by the will. By film-ing movements, they argued, one can first infer force from acceleration and then infer central nervous activity from force. These mechanistic assumptions le