History of neurology and neurophysiology

History of neurology and neurophysiology Bernd Holdorff, Antonio M. Rodrigues e Silva and Richard Dodel: Centenary of the Lewy Bodies (1912-2012) Between the years of 1908 and 1923 F.H. Lewy was the first person to detail the pathological anatomy of Parkinson’s disease (PD) leading to his seminal contribution in 1912 in which he described the neuronal eosinophilic inclusion bodies in the brainstem, later established by more systematic investigations in 1923. Lewy mentioned the widespread pathology but not expressively the inclusion bodies as the hallmark of PD pathology. He attached more importance to the nerve cell depletion of the striatum and later to the pallidum. In spite of the findings of Tretiakoff in 1919 (i.e., the significance of the substantia nigra in PD and coining the term ‘Corps de Lewy’) which for a long time had been underestimated or ignored by Lewy himself and his contemporaries, the era of the Lewy bodies and Lewy body disease and the identification of atypical Parkinsonian syndrome cases followed much later after Lewy’s death in 1950. The main substance of the Lewy body, identified as α-synuclein by Spillantini and coworkers, and the progressive ascension of the Lewy body pathology and its stages recently systematically studied by Braak and coworkers will round up this overview. Apart from the newly founded neurological department in 1932 (Hansa-Klinik Berlin) and forcefully abandoned by Lewy in 1933 some new biographical insights into his US American exile are given. Since his expulsion from Nazi Germany in 1933 he had been cut off from research on PD.