History
The condition was first described in 1935 by American gynecologists Irving F. Stein, Sr. and Michael L. Leventhal, from whom its original name of Stein-Leventhal syndrome is taken. Although Stein and Leventhal were the first in modern medicine to describe the condition, earlier references include the description by Vallisneri in 1721 of larger than normal ovaries and the description by Chereau in 1844 of sclerocystic changes in the ovaries. Chereau's report was followed by observations of other European gynecologists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Stein and Leventhal's article identified the symptoms associated with the ovarian changes and reported wedging procedure as a highly successful remedial procedure. However, the simple symptoms for PCOS described by Stein and Leventhal could not last long, as the same symptoms were also found in patients diagnosed with other ovarian conditions like hyperthecosis and hilus cell tumors as well as in patients diagnosed with nonovarian hyperandrogenism of various types, such as adrenal hyperplasia and Cushing's syndrome. Polycystic ovaries were later found to exist in some women with subtle endocrine disorders. The wide range and frequency of symptoms made it difficult to establish a consistent clinical picture.
Read more about this topic: Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)