Sir Charles Bell was not affected by facial paralysis himself!

Despite our recent commentary on the article by Resende and Weber, the authors still seem to believe that Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842) himself was affected by facial paralysis. They came to this erroneous conclusion from a paper by Jongkees and by “neurological examination of the photograph of Sir Charles Bell” (Fig 1). However, had they taken the effort to check Jongkees’ German translation with the original English text in Bell’s publication the authors would most probably have come to our conclusion that this case report had nothing to do with the clinical history of Sir Charles Bell himself, but that it was a self-observation by Roux of Paris, who indeed did suffer facial paralysis (Fig 2). To our knowledge there is no original photograph of Bell available. What the authors believe to be a photograph of Bell is in fact an engraving made by J. Thompson (probably James Thompson (1788-1850)). The engraving was published in Thomas Joseph Pettigrew’s (17911865) ‘Biographical memoirs of the most celebrated physicians, surgeons, etc. etc.’, and is part of a biography of Charles Bell, in which no evidence can be found of Bell having had facial paralysis. Thompson had made this engraving after a painting of Bell by John Ballentyne (18151897), which makes it an even less objective depiction of Sir Charles Bell. This is clearly illustrated by differences between Thompson’s engraving and the painting of Bell by Dorofield Hardy (1882-1920) (Fig 3), who also used Ballentyne’s painting as an example. In general an artwork is less accurate than a photograph as it is more subject to the personal interpretations, preferences and choices of the artist. Moreover, one has to be careful to conclude that a piece of art such as an engraving, depicts facial paralysis, as it is static in the facial expression and the course of the paralysis. Studying Thompson’s engraving and Hardy’s painting with the same ‘biased’ attitude as the authors do, we can state that there is no nasal deviation and a perfectly normal nasolabial fold, which plead against a facial paralysis. Therefore, we think that the authors must provide other and better evidence if they still believe that Sir Charles Bell had facial paralysis himself. Otherwise, we hope that this historical error has now been rectified.