Category: Neurology
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Early surgery of meningocele
JMS PearceHull, England A variety of dysraphic states, recorded since antiquity, (Fig 1)1 are caused by the failed closure of the neural tube during the fourth week of embryonic life. They include hydrocephalus, Chiari malformations, and various types of spina bifida with meningocele or meningomyelocele. Nicolaes Tulp (1593–1674)—subject of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson—in Observationes Medicae…
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A note on Joseph Jules Dejerine (1849–1917)
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, medicine in Paris flourished.1 Under the charismatic Charcot, it matched or excelled the contemporary advances in Germany and Britain. In the footsteps of Cruveilhier, Gratiolet, and Vicq d’Azyr came Charcot, Vulpian, Pierre Marie, Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette, and Sigmund Freud, who…
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JLW Thudichum: neglected “Father of neurochemistry”
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Thudichum. Photo. National Library of Medicine. Public domain. Knowledge of diseases of the nervous system reflects an understanding of the basic sciences of neural mechanisms and organization. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Nobel prizewinners Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón…
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Silas Weir Mitchell and causalgia
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Silas Weir Mitchell. Photo by Frederick Gutekunst, 1881. National Library of Medicine. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829 – 1914) (Fig 1) was born in Philadelphia, the seventh physician in three generations. Webb Haymaker gives an early clue to his unconventional personality when he…
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Neurophobia or neuroavoidance: a student or educator issue?
Kelsey Andrews Jack Riggs Morgantown, West Virginia, United States “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” – Albert Einstein The human brain – perhaps the most complex and interesting structure in the universe. That statement should make neuroscience a subject of attraction, not avoidance…
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Robert Bentley Todd
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Todd prize for Clinical Medicine (left). Medal by Joseph Shepherd Wyon, 1861. Science Museum, London, United Kingdom. Via Google Arts & Culture. Robert Bentley Todd (right). Mezzotint by G. Zobel, 1860, after D. Y. Blakiston. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. Students of King’s College Hospital London are…
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Paul Pierre Broca
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Paul Pierre Broca. US National Library of Medicine. At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded,…
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Theodor Meynert
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Theodor Meynert. Photo by Ludwig Angerer. Before 1880. Via Wikimedia. Theodor Meynert (1833-1892) (Fig 1) was an eminent if eccentric neuropathologist and psychiatrist. His original work had an impact not just on medicine but on the philosophy of the mind and the “history of materialism.”1 Modern…
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Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Franz Joseph Gall. By Zéphirin Félix Jean Marius Belliard. Via Wikimedia. For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology. -Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit…
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Edward Lear
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Lear by Wilhelm Marstrand 1840 NPG 3055 [public domain] How pleasant to know Mr Lear! Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer But a few think him pleasant enough. Edward Lear 1879 Hundreds of famous people from every branch of…