Tag: 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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The pineal: Seat of the soul
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom The pineal for millennia had been a structure of mystery. In Ancient Egyptian culture, The Eye of Horus was a sign of prosperity and protection, often referred to as the third eye. In Ayurvedic physiology it corresponds to the sixth chakra—Ajna, located in the middle of the forehead, representing intelligence,…
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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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Neurophobia or neuroavoidance: a student or educator issue?
Kelsey AndrewsJack Riggs Morgantown, West Virginia, United States “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”– Albert Einstein Jozefowicz introduced a new term in neurology education literature in 1994, defining “neurophobia” as “a fear of the neurosciences and clinical neurology that is due to the student’s inability…
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Robert Bentley Todd
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Students of King’s College Hospital London are familiar with the Todd Prize in Clinical Medicine and with Todd Ward. Robert Bentley Todd’s father, Charles Hawkes Todd, was a well-known surgeon of 3 Kildare Street Dublin. His mother was Elizabeth Bentley, a relative of the poet Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself…
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The “Ne-Uro” mess
Nishitha BujalaHyderabad, Telangana, India When I took my oral exams in the final year of medical school, I was tested on surgical instruments by an external professor. He appeared to be in his sixties and stern. As a conversation starter, he asked my favorite specialty. “Neurology,” I answered. As a professor of urology, he was…
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Paul Pierre Broca
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom 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, “The cerebral cortex functions as an indivisible whole . . . an…
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Theodor Meynert
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom 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 brain research attempts to unravel the intricacies of human brain-mind relationships, much of which…
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Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom 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 was imprecisely thought to reside in the brain’s ventricles and pineal. In the second century AD,…
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Edward Lear
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom How pleasant to know Mr Lear!Who has written such volumes of stuff!Some think him ill-tempered and queerBut a few think him pleasant enough.—Edward Lear 1879 Hundreds of famous people from every branch of life have been diagnosed or suspected—sometimes on dubious evidence—as sufferers from the symptom epilepsy. Edward Lear (1812–1888)…