In July 2005, 30 of my colleagues and I celebrated our 60th anniversary of graduation in Medicine in 1945, from the Newcastle Medical School, then a part of King's College Newcastle, in the University of Durham. Immediately after graduation, I became House Officer to Professor F. J. Nattrass, who, though Professor of Medicine, had also made a name in neurology, his principal special interest. Indeed, he wrote a short textbook which sold well in the 1930s, entitled The Commoner Nervous Diseases ; his seminal paper on recurrent polyneuritis, as it was then called, led to this condition being referred to in the French literature even today as ‘Maladie de Nattrass’. It is interesting, even alarming, in retrospect, to note just how much of the practice of medicine, and of neurological medicine in particular, was based upon tradition and myth rather than scientific fact. Although motor neuron disease in its various forms was reasonably well recognized and characterized, any patient presenting with a spastic paraparesis was thought to be suffering from disseminated sclerosis (as it was then called) unless proven otherwise. As there was a widespread belief that lumbar puncture was harmful in patients with that condition, I was never allowed, as a house physician, to carry out that procedure even in suspected cases; goodness knows how many spinal neoplasms were consequently overlooked, especially since, in the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, the principal teaching hospital, there were no facilities for myelography or other forms of neuroradiology; and any patient requiring such procedures had to be transferred to the care of the neurosurgeons under G. F. Rowbotham at the Newcastle General Hospital. But even in that department in 1946, there were no facilities for angiography and any patient suspected of having an intracranial tumour was subjected to air encephalography unless the …