Researching Tourette syndrome in Europe.

Abstract

Gilles de la Tourette syndromewas first described in Europe by the Parisian school of Jean-Martin Charcot in the second half of the XIX century. In 1885, French physician Georges Albert Edouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904), one of the most pre-eminent figures in Charcot’s neuropsychiatry school, published a case series of nine patients who presentedwith the clinical triad of tics, echolalia and coprolalia. It was Charcot himself who named the condition after Gilles de la Tourette, securing eponymic (hence immortal) fame to his flamboyant pupil. As a medical condition, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome has a fascinating history on its own. Long considered to be a rare, somewhat bizarre medical curiosity, it progressively shifted towards the concept of a relatively common disorder, which in its milder forms can be regarded as a variant of healthy human behaviour. Recent estimates suggested that the prevalence of Tourette syndrome (or TS – as it is now called, especially in the American literature) can be as high as 1% in school-age children, if diagnosed according to current diagnostic criteria. Most importantly, TS’ unique position at the interface between neurology and psychiatry has attracted the interest of scholars and researchers, which devote their efforts to improve our understanding of the causes and effects of this fascinat-