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Book review |
FROM NEUROSCIENCE TO NEUROLOGY: NEUROSCIENCE, MOLECULAR MEDICINE, AND THE THERAPEUTIC TRANSFORMATION OF NEUROLOGY
Edited by Stephen Waxman 2005
London: Elsevier Academic Press.
Price £77.50 $(US)125.00 ISBN: 0-12-738903-2
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Neurology: the case for treatment
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In July 2005, 30 of my colleagues and I celebrated our 60th anniversary of graduation in Medicine in 1945, from the Newcastle Medical School, then a part of King's College Newcastle, in the University of Durham. Immediately after graduation, I became House Officer to Professor F. J. Nattrass, who, though Professor of Medicine, had also made a name in neurology, his principal special interest. Indeed, he wrote a short textbook which sold well in the 1930s, entitled The Commoner Nervous Diseases; his seminal paper on recurrent polyneuritis, as it was then called, led to this condition being referred to in the French literature even today as ‘Maladie de Nattrass’.
It is interesting, even alarming, in retrospect, to note just how much of the practice of medicine, and of neurological medicine in particular, was based upon tradition and myth rather than scientific fact. Although motor neuron disease in its various
Lord Walton of Detchant, Detchant, Northumberland