1: Mov Disord. 1997 Nov;12(6):1068-72.

The shaking palsy, the first forty-five years: a journey through the British
literature.

Louis ED.

Department of Neurology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University,
New York, New York, USA.

The authors examined the British medical literature published in the
45-year-period following Parkinson's treatise on the shaking palsy to determine
the number and type of references to the shaking palsy or paralysis agitans
during this particular period. Several sources suggest that Parkinson's 1817
treatise on the shaking palsy received little immediate attention in his native
country, England, and that not until 1861, in France, did Charcot began to
elucidate the clinical features of this entity, separating it from other
neurologic disorders (for example, multiple sclerosis). A review of the British
medical literature from the 45-year-period 1817-1861 revealed a number of
references to paralysis agitans, including those by Cooke (1820), Good (1824 and
1829), Elliotson (1827, 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1833), Gowry (1831), anonymous
(1832), Todd (1833), Watson (1836), Gibson (1839), Hall (1838 and 1841), Thompson
(1842), Graves (1843), Birkett (1853), Paget (1855), and Reynolds (1855). Many of
these did not report new or personally observed cases, did not separate
Parkinson's disease from other disease entities characterized by both "shaking"
and "palsy" (for example, tonic-clonic seizures), or misattributed motor signs to
dysfunction of the pyramidal system rather than an extrapyramidal system (that
is, attributing bradykinesia or rigidity to weakness). Although there were
several references to "shaking palsy" in the early- to mid-19th-century British
medical literature, there were few original case reports of Parkinson's disease.
This may have contributed to the fact that during this period little was added to
the original observations made by Parkinson in 1817. In particular, the
separation of bradykinesia and weakness did not become apparent until later work
by the French.


PMID: 9399240 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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