Raynaud’s phenomenon

April 13, 2023

JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Raynaud’s thesis. In 1862, Maurice Raynaud (1834–81) of Paris provided one of the finest descriptive accounts in clinical medicine in his doctoral dissertation on episodic digital ischemia. Yet lasting recognition came only after his death. He described twenty-five patients, twenty of whom were female, and with astonishing accuracy deduced the […]

Sympathectomy for hypertension

December 17, 2020

Components of the sympathetic trunk. Redrawn from Wolf-Heidegger’s Atlas of Human Anatomy. From Anatomic Origin and Molecular Genetics in Neuroblastoma. CC BY 3.0. Sympathectomy for essential hypertension was introduced in the late 1920s at a time when no effective medical treatment was available. It consisted of resecting several sympathetic neurons that exit the spinal cord […]