BRIGO F.

Introduction. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the terms quarantine, contagion and infection have again become part of our everyday speech, prompting historians to reflect on the settings in which they were originally used and to make comparisons with the present time. How did people cope with epidemics in the past? What measures were taken?...

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Franz Tappeiner (1816, Laas – 1902, Merano) was an Austrian physician and anthropologist. He studied at the universities of Prague, Padua and Vienna and in 1846 he moved to Merano. Tappeiner investigated the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in animal models and he dealt with public health. As an anatomist, he performed thousands of...

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This article provides a brief geographical, linguistic, historical, and anthropological overview of the cult of the Saints invoked against epilepsy in Italy at the beginning of the last century. In many areas of Italy, epilepsy was referred to as a disease associated with the names of some saints. The authors provide biographical notes of the...

Medical Humanities & Tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the oldest diseases known to affect humanity and is still a major public health problem. Today TB is one of the ten most frequent causes of death in the world. It is caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis, iso-lated by Robert Koch at the end of XIX Century when it was one...

"A Kind of Alaska"is a one-act play by the British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter (1930-2008), based on the book Awakenings by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). This play, first performed in 1982, is centered around the character of Deborah, a middle-aged woman, struck by encephalitis lethargica ("sleeping sickness") at...

We describe the Italian contribution to the description and treatment of parkinsonism following encephalitis lethargica (EL): postencephalitic parkinsonism (PEP). Special attention is devoted to the description of postencephalitic symptoms by Giuseppe Panegrossi (1871–1953) and to the treatment based on Atropa belladonna introduced in Italy and...

Introduction: Atypical absences are generalized epileptic seizures typically affecting children with severe epilepsies and learning difficulties along with other seizure types. Video-EEG is essential for their diagnosis. Recently, atypical absence seizures have been reported as a hallmark of some developmental and epileptic encephalopathies....

Starting from the 1920s, the care and management of many post-encephalitis patients who survived the acute phase of encephalitis lethargica were often entrusted to psychiatric hospitals due to the psychic complications of the disease. Antonio D'Ormea, director of the psychiatric hospital of Siena from 1909 to 1952, tried to treat these patients...

In 1904, the XII Congress of the Italian Phreniatric Society (30 years later, it would be named the Italian Psychiatric Society) debated the question of whether the neurosciences should constitute an independent field from psychiatry. Three years later, the Italian Society of Neurology was established and was presided over by Leonardo Bianchi...

Franz Tappeiner (1816–1902) was an Austrian scientist: physician and anthropologist. He studied medicine at the universities of Prague and Padua, and completed his medical education receiving his doctorate in 1843 in Vienna. Tappeiner investigated the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in animal models and he dealt with public health, in...

We propose an analysis of the socio-cultural legacy of encephalitis lethargica and post-encephalitic parkinsonism, and of their representations outside the scientific literature. Over the years, these conditions have been depicted in various ways, fueling a series of reflections on consciousness, time and memory. These representations have...

The "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" is a neurological disorder characterized by visual or somatic disturbances frequently associated with migraine. The first documented description of this syndrome is that of a patient with macrosomatognosia and migraine with aura evaluated by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825- 1893) during a lecture given on November...

Using the case of the vaccine against smallpox as an example, this article explores how the attitude and the politics of the Vatican State towards vaccination changed between the 18th and 19th century. Despite some notable exceptions, the Catholic Church became progressively involved in supporting vaccination in Italy, exerting its temporal and...

One of the most challenging issues with the sources of ancient medicine is to be able to identify the correspondence between the diseases we know today and those reported in ancient medical texts. Ancient diseases' definitions rarely help us, and the symptoms described often correspond to more than one disease. This is especially true about...

Edoardo Maragliano (1849-1940) was an Italian physician; he played a central role in medicine's "renaissance" in Italy and Europe. After beginning his academic career as a professor of pathology, he became full professor of internal medicine in 1881. While he studied all fields of internal medicine, his research focused mainly on tuberculosis....

Introduction: Dravet syndrome (DS) is an early-onset genetic developmental epileptic encephalopathy characterized by multiple seizure types which are refractory to antiseizure medication. There is an unmet need for effective and tolerable drugs to control different seizure types in DS types, with the aim of improving quality of life and...

The "Alice in Wonderland syndrome" (AIWS) is a neurological disorder characterized by altered body schema perception, visual, or somesthetic symptoms, which is frequently associated with migraine. In this article, we present the earliest known description of symptoms attributable to AIWS in the medical literature. During a lecture held on...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had and, due to its long-term effects, continues to have significant psychological consequences for many people. In this article, some of the most relevant signs of this psychological impairment are discussed, as are common reactions characterizing people's behavior in the face of fear triggered by a pandemic. All this...

The Italian neurologist Vincenzo Neri (1880–1960), a pupil of Joseph Babiński (1857–1932), greatly contributed to refining the semiotics of neurological examination and was a pioneer in medical cinematography. In 1909, Neri proposed a sign to diagnose leg paresis due to a pyramidal tract lesion. According to Neri, if a patient standing with the...

Introduction: Recently, an intravenous formulation of carbamazepine (CBZ) (sulphobutylether-7-beta-cyclodextrine carbamazepine, SBECD CBZ) has been developed and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is indicated as a short-term replacement therapy for oral CBZ formulations, when oral administration is temporarily not feasible...

Background Some guidelines or expert consensus indicate that intravenous (IV) lorazepam (LZP) is preferable to IV diazepam (DZP) for initial treatment of convulsive status epilepticus (SE). We aimed to critically assess all the available data on efficacy and tolerability of IV LZP compared with IV DZP as first-line treatment of convulsive SE....

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) laid the foundations of modern neurology. The lectures he gave at La Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris attracted a large number of visitors from all over the world. Some of them transcribed these clinical lessons, translating and publishing them when returning home. This article discusses the contribution of some...