[Olof Sjöqvist]

Olof Sjöqvist was one of the most well-known and promising Swedish neurosurgeons. He started his carrier during a time when neurosurgery was in, I would say, tremendous progress, largely because of the famous neurosurgeon Herbert Olivecrona, his teacher. Olof Sjöqvist had found in a histological study that pain from the face was propagated by thin fibres in the tregiminal nerve that went down in a bow after entering the brain stem, while touch was propagated by thick nerve fibres that immediately turned upwards after entering the brain stem. That allowed him to try a new method of operation called tractotomi, that relieved the pain without causing any damage to the sense of touch. He became very famous due to this method of operation. He also was well known for his operations of intracranial arterial aneurysms and he travelled all over the world to demonstrate his modes of operation. At the newly built Södersjukhuset, a famous hospital in Stockholm, he got a new neurosurgical board where he set up a special ward for children with special room for relatives, that was quite a new invention at that time. Besides neurosurgery Olof Sjöqvist was much interested in history and he wrote about the wounds of the Swedish kings, Gustavus II Adolphus, Carolus XII and Gustavus III. At the age of 53 he was hit by periartheritis nodosa, a disease for which there was no effective treatment at that time. After half a year he died at the hospital where he had been working as a doctor.