Nineteenth Century
The first presentation of Tourette syndrome is thought to be in a 1489 book, Malleus maleficarum ("Witch's hammer") by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, describing a priest whose tics were "believed to be related to possession by the devil". A French doctor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, reported the first case of Tourette syndrome in 1825, describing Marquise de Dampierre, an important woman of nobility in her time, whose episodes later understood to be coprolalia "were obviously in stark contrast to the lady's background, intellect, and refined manners".
Jean-Martin Charcot, an influential French physician, assigned his resident Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette, a French physician and neurologist, to study patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital, with the goal of defining an illness distinct from hysteria and from chorea. Charcot and Gilles de la Tourette believed that the "tic illness" they had observed was an untreatable, chronic, and progressive hereditary condition. History is unclear on whether Charcot had examined the Marquise de Dampierre, but his publications mention having met her socially and overhearing her most common utterances of "merde and foutu cochon (which translates literally as filthy pig but the truer colloquial meaning is 'fucking pig')".
In 1885, Gilles de la Tourette published an account of nine patients, Study of a Nervous Affliction, concluding that a new clinical category should be defined. His description included accounts of Marquise de Dampierre, previously described by Itard, as a reclusive aristocratic lady who "ticked and blasphemed" from the age of seven until her death at the age of 80 years. Gilles de la Tourette describes the common feature of involuntary movements or tics in all nine patients. The eponym was later bestowed by Charcot after and on behalf of Gilles de la Tourette.
Little progress was made over the next century in explaining or treating tics. With limited clinical experience, involving typically one or two patients, authors advanced different ideas, including brain lesions similar to those resulting from rheumatic chorea or encephalitis lethargica as a cause of tics, faulty mechanisms of normal habit formation, and treatment with Freudian psychoanalysis. The psychogenic view prevailed well into the 20th century.
Read more about this topic: History Of Tourette Syndrome
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