The tardy development of UK neurology

Abstract

This carefully planned and well-organized volume, presented in lucid, readable prose, arose out of a doctoral thesis presented by Dr Stephen Casper, an American, while he worked at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, and publication was supported by a grant from the Association of British Neurologists (ABN). There is a suitably analytical and complimentary foreword by Robert Y. Moore, the Love Family Professor Emeritus of Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author has provided a comprehensive preface, in which he pays tribute to the many historians and others who have guided him, and also lists many British neurologists, including myself, whom he interviewed. It is some years since I met him, so that the gestation period leading to publication has been lengthy; but, having read the book, I believe that it has been worth waiting for. Following an introduction entitled From Physician to Neurologist , there are five major chapters, the first dealing with physicians in neurological societies and neurologists in general medical societies, the second with World War I and the transformation of neurology, the third with neurology in inter-war Britain, the fourth with neurology and state medicine, and finally a comment upon the integrated legacy of contemporary specialists in neurology up until the year 2000. One major topic recurs in many different guises, namely the pervasive conflict between the generalists on the one hand and the specialists on the other; the dead hand of the former plainly delayed the development of neurology as a specialty in Britain, much more so than in much of continental Europe and in North America. In the author’s view, the eventual victory of the specialists shed light on a phenomenon which emerged in the last decades of the 20th century—the rise of a …