Chapter 38: American neurology.

The great formative event in the history of North America, the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was the stimulus for the development of clinical neurology and the neurosciences. The first neurological research center on the continent was the US Army hospital at Turner's Lane, Philadelphia, PA. Silas Weir Mitchell and his colleagues described causalgia (reflex sympathetic dystrophy), phantom limb sensation, and Horner's syndrome (before Horner).

William Alexander Hammond: the centenary of his death.

In the United States, the field of clinical neurology began within the medical practice of a single physician, William Alexander Hammond. In the 1870s, this New York medical practitioner became the first American physician who limited his practice to patients who suffered from symptoms potentially due to dysfunction of the nervous system. From the experience of his huge practice, Hammond wrote the first American textbook of neurology.

The first career of William Alexander Hammond.

Neurology in its modern sense was first studied in the well-known neurological institutions of France and England. In America, however, this new field of medicine was developed by a physician in a private practice, Dr. William Alexander Hammond.