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Editorial
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Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) might be considered the Great Houdini of functional neuroanatomy. Neatly side-stepping the correction to his ‘discovery’ (Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain, 1811: published privately and not made generally available until 1839) that the anterior nerve roots of the spinal cord are motor and sensory (the ‘way in’) and the posterior roots entirely motor (the ‘way out’) offered by Francois Magendie (1753–1855) in 1822, Bell allowed it be known that this was what he had in fact always said. The story is told in Paul Cranefield's magnificent ‘The way in and the way out’ (1974); but 196 years later, Thomas Dormandy evidently makes the same mistake. In ‘Pain past, present and future: the unhappy paradox of scientific advances and therapeutic standstill’, despite Dr Dormandy's rich historical account of the many attempts to grapple with this story, Geoff
Cambridge