Tag: Neurology
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Staining the cells of the nervous system
Camillo Golgi (1843 –1926) was an Italian biologist and pathologist, now recognized as the greatest neuroscientist of his time. He studied and worked at the University of Pavia, where he developed a technique of using potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to stain cellular components black. Using this stain he was able to discover the organelle now known as the Golgi apparatus, consisting…
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Oliver Sacks and caring for the whole person
Margaret MarcumBoca Raton, Florida The neurologist Oliver Sacks—“The Poet Laureate of Medicine” according to The New York Times—developed an effective clinical method of treating the patient as a complete person rather than as a defective body part. He wrote that clinicians “are concerned not simply with a handful of ‘symptoms,’ but with a person, and…
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The central nervous system of the leech
Leeches are worms of the subspecies Hirudinea that live in oceans, rivers, or on land. They consist of several parts or segments; a front area designated as the head or anterior brain, the middle part consisting of segments each containing a nerve ganglion as well as other organs, and the hind part which has the…
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Catalepsy
Catalepsy has been defined as a trance or seizure with a loss of sensation and consciousness accompanied by rigidity of the body. It may occur in neurological diseases such as Parkinsonism and epilepsy, also following the withdrawal from certain drugs such as cocaine. These images are part of a series of observations made in an…
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Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.
JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth century. In a golden era of…
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William Richard Gowers MD., FRS.
JMS PearceHull, England The name Gowers is a name hallowed in the minds of most neurologists as one of the great founders of neurological medicine in the Victorian era. He is probably best remembered for his A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System (1886) (Fig 1.), a rich source of wisdom and clinical description…
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The names of things
Joseph HodappCupertino, California, USA It’s a gray-sky, late-October afternoon. I just got home from work when I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. The caller ID provides a brief preface: Mom. “Hey Mom, what’s up?” “Hey Hun, I wanted to call you right away… my mom had a stroke this morning.” Her words are…
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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,…