History of Neurology - Diagnostics

Diagnostics

Physicians could use the ideas of neurology in practice only if they developed proper tools and procedures for clinical investigation. This happened step by step in the 19th century – tendon hammer, ophthalmoscope, pin and tuning fork, syringe and lumbar puncture. X rays, the electro-encephalography, angiography, and CAT scans were to follow. The clinical neurologists correlated their findings after death with those of the neuropathologist. The best known was W.R. Gowers (1845–1915) who owned a major text in two volumes, of a cerebrospinal tract. By the end of the nineteenth century, the connection was established between stroke and hemiplegia, between trauma and paraplegia, between the spirochaete and the paralysed demency people who filled the mental hospitals. The first chemotherapeutic cure of a serious infection was salvarsan for syphilis, followed by the induction of fever in neurosyphilis. The treatment of neurosyphilis became highly effective when antibiotics were introduced.