Founders of Neurology

The writer of a note to Charles C Thomas recommending a new printing of The Founders, or a revision, tempered his suggestion by adding: "The type f material presented is not such a nature that it ever gets out of date." Or does it? What seems firmly established die priori, will it necessarily appear so die posteriori? A review of the 1953 edition made it evident that a considerable number of the biographies needed, here and there, a different orientation, a new slant. More important, some who obviously were "founders" had to be added. Hence a mere reprinting would no do. Who, then, we continued to ask ourselves, was a Founder, and not merely a Refiner? And what, in fact is Neurology? For Neurology was not all founded by neurologists. Physicians long past, treating epilepsy or paralysis, had never heard its name - like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, learning one day that all his life he had been speaking prose. Neurologia first occurred to Thomas Willis as an analogy to myologia and osteologia. Willis also was the first to focus on the subject as we understand it, hence we must go back to him. Why not go further back? Did Galen or the Hippocratic writers not know and teach a lot about the nervous system? Tree, but it was not their major concern. The early founders of neurology were its emancipators. Subsequent founders in the eighteenth century made inroad after inroad until Neurology took on facets not even dreamed of in the earlier days. A greater number of men who transformed Neurology in these transitional years, including neurochemists, have been added to the assemblage that made up the 1953 edition. Contains alphabetical within sub-specialties, with a chronological break in the mid-nineteenth century for anatomists. Contains in this series 112 reworked previous biographies and 34 new ones. 1970 - Second Edition.