I just saw the musical Six, which unfortunately doesn't tell you some of the really interesting stuff about the wives of Henry VIII (but I got you, fam). Here's a cool #histmed (and neuro!) thing about Catherine of Aragon, Henry's 1st wife: Catherine married Henry's brother, Arthur in 1501 when she was 16 (betrothed when she was 3 and he was 11) and he died 5 months later.
Her parents were Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain - yes, the Columbus ones - and they hadn't paid her whole dowry yet. England wanted her dowry.

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)
1/🪑 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/🪑

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 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

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)
1/🪑 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/🪑

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)
1/🪑 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/🪑

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…

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 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

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/

James Lind conducted the 1st randomized medical trial in 1747 when he gave sailors different remedies for scurvy.
In 1863, Austin Flint gave patients with rheumatism a "placebo," and it worked as well as medicines - possibly the first placebo-controlled trial. #histmed 1/7 "Placebo" was already a well-known term and concept. Initially defined as a common medication (seen here in a dictionary from 1785), it came to mean an inert substance that had no effect on a disease, but pleased the patient. 2/7

One of my favorite #histmed stories is the discovery of EEG by Hans Berger in the 1920s. #NeuroTwitter

At age 19, Berger (1873-1940) fell off a horse. On the same day, his sister, miles away, sent a telegraph to ask if he was doing ok. 1/10 He was fine, but he thought he had communicated his frightened thoughts about getting hurt to his sister by telepathy. He decided to study psychiatry, to learn more about inter-brain communication. 2/10