The early history of neuroradiology at the Medical School of the University of Minnesota, 1937-1939.

I completed a two year residency in Radiology at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. This program included all of diagnostic and therapeutic radiology. While in Boston, I had the good fortune to spend five to six evenings with Dr Merrill Sosman who presented a "workshop" type of teaching session on plain skull films and some pneumography to all the residents in the Boston area. Dr Sosman at that time was chairman of the Department of Radiology at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and Professor and head of Radiology at Harvard University Medical School. He was one of only three people in the United States who had a special interest in neu-roradiology. Neuroradiology, however, made up only a small part of Dr Sosman' s total workload. He was chairman of the department and usually had two or three residents in training. There were no other associates, and he personally did or supervised all of the diagnostic and therapeutic radiology done in the department. The first radiologic study carried out on any patient suspected of having a brain tumor or injury would be plain films of the skull. In our department at the University of Minnesota, this consisted of a series of six or seven projections. Dr Sosman published a paper in 1936 which clearly indicated how important these films were. In this study there were 200 cases of verified brain tumors. Dr Sosman was able to locate 50% of the tumors on plain films alone and histologi-cally identify 25 % (also on plain films alone). When ventriculography was added he was able to localize 96% of all intracranial tumors. Encephalography and ventriculography were common procedures prior to CT and MR and (although difficult to do) were in many cases very productive in terms of localizing masses and assisting in differential diagnosis. When cord tumors were suspected, clinically routine plain films of the spine were always taken , but most of the time they did not show positive findings. Myelography using lipiodol and later Pantopaque was the next step. Dr Cornelius Dyke, a student of Dr Sosman , had moved from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where he was a resident to the Neurological Institute in New York sometime in the early thir-ties. Having had Dr Sosman as his mentor, he naturally picked up considerable knowledge in neuroradiology when he was in Boston. He was the first full-time …