Ali Christy, MD, PhD Profile picture
Nov 29, 2022 21 tweets 10 min read Read on X
Meet the Luminaries from EndowedChairs.com, a card game created with @zach_london

#NeuroTwitter #gamedev #histmed @somedocs

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Luminary #4: Dorothy Russell (1895-1983)
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Hands up if you used this textbook! The 7th edition of "R&R" was published in 2007.
You may have known that this was written by eminent neuropathologist Dorothy Russell, but did you know she had epilepsy? 2/🪑 Image
Russell was born in Australia, but after both her parents died (her mother from measles), Dorothy and her sister Petronella went to live in England with an aunt. 3/🪑 Image
Her friend from the Perse School for Girls recalled that she always wanted to be "a research doctor." Here Russell is 3rd from the right, holding a netball. journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117… 4/🪑 Image
She went to Girton College, the 1st women's college in Cambridge, where she studied zoology and was "top in the subject" but still couldn't get a B.A. degree - until 1942 - because she was a woman. She then received a scholarship to spend a year studying entomology. 4/🪑 Image
Russell had #epilepsy "until middle age." This blurb is all we know about it.
She had reasons to hide it. In the early 1900s, ideas of eugenics were prominent in the scientific community. "Epileptic" was considered a reason for preventing marriage, or forcing sterilization. 5/🪑 DOROTHY S RUSSELL HVS and M...
"She also asked us to make it known after her death so that others suffering from the same disability might learn that epilepsy is no essential bar to reaching the heights of any profession."
6/🪑 Image
Because WWI caused a shortage of physicians, the London Hospital Medical College (reluctantly) allowed women to study in 1918. Russell was one of about 30 women when she started medical school in 1919. 7/🪑 Image
Russell excelled in Morbid Anatomy - which was not a metal band, but rather a class in pathology under the famous Hubert Turnbull (1875-1955).
(If you look at her Endowed Chairs card, one of her books is labeled Morbid Anatomy) 8/🪑 Image
So Russell went into pathology, and worked for years researching kidney disease.
Then she met Hugh Cairns, who had worked with the neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing in Boston and saw how he worked closely with his neuropathologists (including Louise Eisenhardt). 9/🪑 Image
Cairns (1896-1952) encouraged Russell to study neuropathology - so she traveled to Boston and Montreal to learn cutting edge cell-staining techniques from Penfield and others.
Here's the passenger list from the boat she took to NYC in 1928: 10/🪑 Image
And here's a picture of neurons from a paper she wrote about her work in 1929.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
She worked with Cairns in London for 15 years, and changed the way glial cells were stained and studied. 11/🪑 Image
In 1935, she made a time-lapse film (!) with Ronald Canti and J.O.W. Bland that showed pulsatile contractions of oligodendrocytes - which must have been🤯when the film was shown at a pathology conference that year.
(It's at the National Film Archives, has anyone seen it?) 12/🪑 Image
This is a normal cerebellum (beautiful) from one of Russell's papers in 1937, to show contrast with the cerebellum in a familial leukodystrophy
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… 12/🪑 Image
Then Cairns decided to leave for Oxford, and Russell declined to join him - until 1939, when impending war drew her out of London. In Oxford Russell worked primarily on the pathology of military head injuries and subsequent infections. 13/🪑 "Why is Pio del Rio Ho...
In 1944 Russell went back to London - despite Cairns' vocal displeasure. In 1946 she succeeded Turnbull as pathology chair, the 1st woman in this role in Western Europe. 14/🪑 Image
In 1949, she published Observations on the Pathology of Hydrocephalus, a groundbreaking text on the condition. 15/🪑 Image
In 1959, Russell published the 1st comprehensive textbook of tumor neuropathology, with Lucien Rubinstein. R&R would have 6 updated editions in the next 50 years.
Rubinstein found her a kind, generous mentor, and described her as a woman of "stately dignity." 14/🪑 Image
Other colleagues called Russell "The Lady."
"Not much of a sense of humor." "She was very formidable at meetings." "The mistress of the devastating put-down." A "rather masculine outer shell." 15/🪑 Image
I can believe Russell needed a strong shell (and a few withering putdowns) to achieve so much in a medical world dominated by men.
When she retired at 65, she retired hard. She lived alone, saw friends, and gardened at her house in Surrey, until her death in 1983. 15/🪑 Image
Brilliant, determined, and fierce, fighting every step of the way, as a woman - with a diagnosis of epilepsy.

The quote on her card is from the first line of this article, and it's one of my faves (don't tell the others).

Read more at EndowedChairs.com! 🪑/🪑 THE LANCET SPECIAL ARTICLES...

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More from @OligoclonalBand

Dec 1, 2022
Meet the Luminaries from EndowedChairs.com, a card game created with
@zach_london

#NeuroTwitter #gamedev #histmed
@somedocs

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Luminary #5: Isabelle Rapin (1927-2017)
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Isabelle Rapin is the perfect Luminary to discuss today, because she was born December 4🎂and was a founding member of the @ChildNeuroSoc in 1973 in #Nashville (where everyone is going for #AES2022).
Peds neurologists know why she has a pinwheel on her card - do you? 2/🪑 Image
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland - where Augusta Déjerine-Klumpke studied - Rapin went to medical school locally. Like ADK, she worked at the Salpétrière - and like ADK, she wrote a brief autobiography (please write one, send to @JChildNeurol) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08… 3/🪑 Image
Read 17 tweets
Nov 29, 2022
Happy birthday (November 29) to the Father of Neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893)!

I wouldn't say we're best friends exactly, but yeah, we used to hang out in Paris together.
1/4 Image
Charcot was a neurologist in Paris in the late 1800s, when neurology was developing as a field. He was the 1st chair of neurology, and was a celebrity doctor at the time (this is a poem written and published in the newspaper after his death in 1893). 2/8 Image
He was so famous that charlatans used his name after his death to sell "Kola Nervine Tablets" made from the "wonder-working Kola nut." 3/8 Image
Read 9 tweets
Nov 17, 2022
Let's meet the Luminaries from EndowedChairs.com, a card game created with @zach_london.
#NeuroTwitter #gamedev #histmed @somedocs

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Luminary #1: Sarah McNutt (1839-1930)
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In 2002, Horn and Goetz published this excellent paper on McNutt - the 1st woman elected to the American Neurological Association (@TheNewANA1) - and her work with other early female physicians, including the Blackwells. n.neurology.org/content/59/1/1… 2/🪑 Image
McNutt came from a long line of female midwives and healers, including Sarah Weir, who worked on Nantucket, and Rachel Hussey, who delivered 2992 children (both called physicians here, but neither MDs) 3/🪑 ImageImage
Read 19 tweets
Sep 3, 2022
Here's a fun story about the earliest known neurological text: the Edwin Smith Papyrus. #histmed #NeuroTwitter #NeuroHistory

Edwin Smith, born in Connecticut, lived in Egypt in the late 1800s. An antiquities dealer, he bought a papyrus in 1862 that he was unable to translate.
Smith died in 1906, and his daughter donated the scroll to the New York Historical Society.
In 1920, Egyptologist Caroline Ransom Williams found it and recognized its worth. She wrote to her mentor James Henry Breasted and asked him to translate it. brewminate.com/the-contributi… Caroline Ransom Williams, in cap and gown
Ransom Williams felt she was too occupied with family to take it on.
“The papyrus is probably the most valuable one owned by the Society and I am ready to waive my interest in it, in the hope that it may be published sooner and better than I could do it.” [November 22, 1920] Caroline Ransom Williams, in black and white, on a ladder, r
Read 13 tweets
Aug 17, 2022
Bradford-Hill's trial of streptomycin for TB (see my thread from earlier today) was the first randomized controlled trial - but not blinded, and not placebo controlled. There was another trial, around the same time, for a medication called patulin. 1/6 Figure from Chalmers and Cl...
You've never heard of patulin? It's a mycotoxin (it grows on apples), once used as an antibiotic (but not any more, due to toxicity).
In the 1940s, it was billed as the cure for the common cold. 2/6 Newspaper article from 1943...
A study showed that if you spray patulin in someone's nose when they have a cold, they feel much better - within 48 hours - than people who didn't receive any treatment.
This was huge! Everyone wanted patulin to treat colds.
So what happened? 3/6 A newspaper clipping:  Patu...
Read 6 tweets
Aug 17, 2022
Here’s a good story about the placebo effect – on physicians:
If you had a stroke in 1810, it would have been diagnosed clinically, without MRI. Your doctors knew that if you died, your brain held either fluid (edema, ischemic stroke) or blood (hemorrhagic stroke). 1/
So obviously the problem was that there was too much fluid in your body.
Solution? Reduce fluid, by blood-letting. This was the solution to a lot of things (one of these days I'll do a #histmed #tweetorial on Benjamin Rush).
And many people got better. 2/
People got better because when you have a small stroke, inflammation and edema make symptoms worse initially, and then, over time, symptoms improve.
If they didn't get better? Easy - you didn't bleed them enough. 3/
Read 8 tweets

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