Category: Neurology
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Duchenne de Boulogne
JMS PearceEast Yorks, England The eponymous Duchenne muscular dystrophy still provokes a sense of sadness in afflicted families and therapeutic impotence in their medical attendants. Although both Edward Meryon (1852) and Wilhelm Griesinger (1865) published early case reports, when Duchenne described the progressive, sex-linked, recessive muscular dystrophy of early childhood, the disorder was almost unknown…
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Carroll’s Wonderland
Yvonne KusiimaKampala, Uganda In 1865 the world was introduced to the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In the book, a young girl named Alice is feeling bored and drowsy while sitting on the riverbank with her elder sister when she notices a talking,…
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Hammond, Lincoln, and the emergence of American neurology
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.– William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s words describe the extraordinary life of William Alexander Hammond.1-8 LC McHenry, a historian of neurology, dubbed Hammond…
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Faith, neuroscience, and “the thorn” in Paul’s side: Abrahamic interpretations of epilepsy
Christina PerriStony Brook, New York, United States The experience of epileptic seizures, as characterized by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and others, resonates with the intense religious consciousness of shamans, who describe losing all sense of time, place, and even self.1 Most religious traditions have complex or even ugly relationships with epilepsy that offer explanations for…
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Parkinson’s disease, the enduring eponym
The man who described what Jean Charcot six decades later called “la maladie de Parkinson” was a man of many parts. In his youth he studied Greek and Latin, and also learned shorthand, which he considered an essential skill for a doctor. He was an avid collector of fossils, minerals, and shells, and went on…
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Kinnier Wilson
Samuel Kinnier Wilson (1878-1937), one of the greatest neurologists of the first half of the twentieth century, described in 1912 under the title “progressive lenticular degeneration” what became known as “Wilson’s disease.” Born in New Jersey to a Scottish mother and an Irish missionary Presbyterian minister, he went to Scotland for his education, graduated from…
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Jean Cruveilhier – first described the lesions of multiple sclerosis
Jean Cruveilhier was born in 1791 in Limoges, France, the son of a military surgeon. He had intended to become a priest but changed his mind at the insistence of his father and became a doctor, graduating from the University of Paris in 1816. In 1823 he was appointed professor of surgery at the University of…
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William Alexander Hammond
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom In much of the nineteenth century, ”internal medicine” dominated medical practice in the United States. Specialism was widely disdained and faced hostility and scepticism,i, not least from the influential Sir William Osler: There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases…
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Pierre Marie (1853-1940)
Pierre Marie (1853-1940) was a French neurologist and native of Paris who after finishing medical school started as an intern under the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, worked through the ranks, and eventually was appointd to the chair of neurology at the Faculty of Medicine from 1917-1925. One of Marie’s early contributions was a description of acromegaly…