Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Neurology

  • Macdonald Critchley

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England Macdonald Critchley was a neurologist of elegance and sophistication.1 He was pre-eminently a clinical investigator of disorders of higher mental functions, especially those relating to language. He was the author of many beautifully written scientific papers, books, and delightful personal reminiscences.2 Born in Bristol in February 1900, his childhood ability was…

  • The amnesic jokester

    Jason BrandtBaltimore, Maryland, United States Bob T. had suffered a stroke. Not the kind of massive, devastating stroke that left him bereft of language (aphasia), or that rendered him paralyzed on one side of his body (hemiplegia). No, this was a very small stroke deep within his brain; in the medial-dorsal thalamus of the left…

  • Derek Ernest Denny-Brown

    JMS PearceHull, England Amongst the titans of medicine, it is not easy to pick out those whose footprints will not fade with passing time. Derek Denny-Brown (Fig 1) was one. He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. After his graduation in medicine from Otago University in 1924, he won a Beit fellowship to study in…

  • Howard H. Tooth CB., CMG., MD., FRCP.

    JMS PearceHull, England Howard Tooth (1856-1925) was one of many physicians who served well their patients and their profession, but who would be unknown save for a syndrome that bears and perpetuates their name. Howard Tooth (Fig 1) was born in Hove, Sussex, educated at Rugby School and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he…

  • William John Adie (1886–1935)

    JMS PearceHull, England William John Adie (Fig 1) deserves to be remembered as an unusually gifted, compassionate clinician and teacher, but he is best known for his account of the myotonic (Holmes-Adie) pupil. One of many talented Australians who enhanced British medicine, Adie was born in Geelong, west of Melbourne. He was educated at Flinder’s…

  • Sir Francis Walshe MD FRS

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK Francis Martin Rouse Walshe (1885-1973) (Fig 1) was a remarkable man, that rare mixture of clinician and student of basic science. He was always in pursuit of the mechanisms and physiology of nervous disease, always questioning received dogma, and always critical of sloppy thinking and writing. Born in London of Irish…

  • Walter Russell Brain DM FRCP FRS (1895–1966)

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Russell Brain (Fig 1) was born at Clovelly, Denmark Road, Reading, on 23 October 1895, the only son of Walter John Brain, solicitor, and his wife, Edith Alice. A quiet, reserved man of enormous intellect and integrity, he was revered as an eminent neurologist, philosopher, and author. At Mill Hill School…

  • Can behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia salvage Semmelweis?

    Faraze A. NiaziJack E. RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Remember me for the mind I had; not the mind a disease created.  Few physicians have made a more significant observation than did Ignaz Semmelweis.1 In 1847 he took over two obstetric divisions at the Vienna General Hospital. In Division 1, where babies were delivered by…

  • Origins of the knee jerk

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Reflex hammers are the icon or hallmark of every neurologist. How important are the reflexes they elicit? What is their mechanism? The advent of modern technology has made it easy to forget how important the skills and means in eliciting physical signs were to clinicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth…

  • Tendon reflex hammers

    JMS Pearce East York, England The vogue for reflex hammers started with Erb and Westphal’s adjacent papers1,2 in the 1875 issue of the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, which described the tendon or muscle stretch reflex. Wilhelm Heinrich Erb (1840-1921) read medicine at Heidelberg where he remained for most of his life. The leading neurologist in…