Neurographs : a series of neurological studies, cases, and notes / Editor William Browning.

Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Neurographs : a series of neurological studies, cases, and notes / Editor William Browning. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    HISTORICAL NOTE ON HEREDITARY CHOREA. By William Osier, M.D., F.R.S., of Oxford, England. While working at the subject of Sydenham's chorea, in 1886-87, I became interested in other forms, and my attention was directed to the hereditary variety described as prevalent in the eastern part of Long Island. I wrote to Dr. George Huntington, and in a letter dated La Grangeville, New York, June 9, 1886, he gave me a few additional facts and referred me to Dr. Osborn, of East- hampton. From the latter I obtained a good deal of information about the distribution of the disease, and I had arranged with him to visit the place, but he wrote in Jul)r, 1887, that the subjects were so sensitive that he did not think I could get access to them if I came. In 1898 Dr. Osborn again sent me notes of the cases. It may be interesting to follow briefly in the literature the original description of the three chief sub-divisions of the diseases we now speak of under the name chorea. The name came from the dancing mania which had prevailed extensively throughout Europe in the middle ages—an epidemic of a remarkable character in which hundreds, even thousands of persons became possessed with a common delusion and danced through the country like raving maniacs. The malady was believed to be due . to the work of demons, but, as Hecker says, Paracelsus, that mighty, but as yet scarcely comprehended reformer of medicine, whose aim it was to withdraw diseases from the pale of miraculous interpositions and saintly influence and explain their causes upon principles deduced from his knowledge of the human frame, would not admit for a