Category: Neurology
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Moritz Romberg
Like many other pioneers in the medical sciences, Moritz Romberg would hardly be remembered today were it not for his description of a test that, just as Joseph Babinksi’s, is still part of the routine neurologic examination. The Romberg test is deemed to be positive when the patient becomes unsteady on standing with feet together…
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Locked-in syndrome: Inside the cocoon
Anika KhanKarachi, Pakistan “…what will you carry back from this field trip into my endless solitude?”From The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997) In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke that made him a prisoner in his own body.1 Within the space of a few hours, his hectic, animated existence…
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Revisiting a medical classic
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Théophile Alajouanine delivered the Harveian Lecture to the Harveian Society of London on March 17, 1948. It was published in the journal Brain in September 1948 and became a medical classic, most frequently cited in papers devoted to the neurology of musical creativity and to the illness of one…
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How will I change three buses to get to that hospital?
Bindu DesaiChicago, Illinois, United States The call from the emergency room surprised me. In all my years as a neurologist I had never heard of an ‘acute syrinx.’ In a cubicle in the emergency room lay a man in his mid-thirties. He said he had been drinking heavily the night before and, in his happily…
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Pascal’s disease
Bo LaestadiusStockholm, Sweden The French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal was born in 1623. At the age of twelve he had already studied Euclid’s geometry on his own and had written a paper about sound waves. A few years later he designed and built a calculator. In mathematics he has given his name to…
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On not remembering faces
Christopher HemondPalo Alto, California, United States The comedian Groucho Marx once said, “I never forget a face, but for you I’ll make an exception.” Inside his humor appears an extraordinary truth—the human ability to effortlessly perceive a face and catalogue it in a mental library many thousands of volumes thick. While Mr. Marx’s derision of…
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Oliver Sacks and seeing beyond synecdoche
Colleen DonnellyDenver, Colorado Thus she was a ‘moron’, ‘fool’, a ‘booby’, or so had appeared and so been called, throughout her whole life, but one with an unexpected, strangely moving, poetic power. Superficially she was a mass of handicaps and incapacities, with the intense frustrations and anxieties attendant on these; at this level she was, and…
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Persistent-Post-Concussion-Syndrome
David Bradbury-SquiresNewfoundland and Labrador, Canada Introduction Concussions are complex, pathophysiological brain injuries that are induced by biomechanical forces1. Concussions affect a substantial portion of the population, as approximately 1.8 – 3.6 million concussions are diagnosed annually in the U.S.A. alone. This appears to be a conservative estimate as many concussions appear to be underreported and/or…
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Reading in the brain
Frederic GilbertHalifax, Canada Alexandre WengerFrom graphic brain tumors to micro-neurological lesions, the increasing sophistication of neuroimaging technologies has greatly contributed to the accuracy of neuronal diagnostics. Concurrent with the development of these technologies, metaphors associated with the readability of the brain have evolved within the scientific literature. A cursory glance at recently published articles from…
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Giddiness
There can be few physicians so dedicated to their art that they do not experience a slight decline in spirits on learning that their patient’s complaint is of giddiness. This frequently means that after exhaustive enquiry it will still not be entirely clear what it is that the patient feels wrong and even less so…