Tag: Neurology
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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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Scars
Morgan AlexanderDayton, Ohio, United States “I see you’ve got some scars here,” the doctor said, gesturing to two faint, thin lines that ran down both sides of the patient’s neck. “What’s that about?” The patient in the room with us was covered in scars across his neck and abdomen. Hesitantly, he confessed that the scars…
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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…
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Sir Charles Symonds 1890-1978 , the neurologist’s neurologist
There was a time when medical practitioners in England would refer their difficult cases to a neurologist paid by the health services to come once a week to consult at the local hospital. Faced with a difficult or puzzling case, this consultant neurologist would send the patient to be seen at the National Hospital for…
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Jules Dejerine
Jules Dejerine originated in Savoy and grew up in the then provincial atmosphere of Geneva, where his father was a carriage proprietor… Young Dejerine had a powerful physique. At the Lycée Calvin he was better known for his swimming and boxing then for his devotion to study…. Nevertheless, he did well in school…left for Paris…
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Multiple [disseminated] sclerosis
“Disseminated sclerosis was described pathologically in the 1830s by Cruveilhier in Paris and Carswell in London, but clinical accounts were sketchy. It was known only to the cognoscenti and regarded as a great rarity. Charcot was the first to diagnose the disease during life, and from 1860 onwards Charcot and Vulpian, and later Charcot writing…