Since before the time of Christ, physicians and other observers of the human condition have been described people with tremors, with stooped posture, and with the rapid, off-balanced walk called festination.
During the fourteenth century, an Italian physician named Franciscus de la Boe claimed that the tremor experienced when the body was moving or performing some activity.
Parkinson’s disease was first described by James Parkinson in his famous essay ‘An Essay in the Shaking Palsy’ published in 1817. In 1892, French physician, Jean Martin Charcot proposed to call this disease as Parkinson’s disease.
Based on the observations of six patients over time, whom Parkinson had never personally examined his descriptions consisting of tremor rigidity, postural abnormalities, and bradykinesia were remarkably accurate.
Sir Victor Horsley is credited with the first attempts to surgically treat a movement disorder in the late nineteenth century. He performed the first cortical ablation procedure for dyskinesia in 1890.
One of Charcot’s students, Edouard Brissaud, suggested that the material basis of Parkinson’s disease might be found in a certain small nerve center or nucleus in the brainstem, called the substantia nigra.
Finally, a student named Tretiakoff, working on his doctoral thesis in Paris, described a number of changes in the nerve cells of the substantia nigra.
Only in the 1960s, pathological and biochemical changes in the brain of patients identified, opening the way to the first effective medication for the disease.
History of Parkinson's disease