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Bringing neurology to the people

Professor of Medical Neurology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Consultant Neurologist, Cambridge, UK
Consultant Neurologist, Sheffield, and President of the Association of British Neurologists, UK

Correspondence to:
Professor C Warlow, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH9 1TE, UK; charles.warlow@ed.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Not so long ago, just over a century, there were no neurologists—at least not in the UK in the sense of physicians who specialised entirely in neurology. By half a century ago a few neurologists had emerged from general internal medicine and were practising in the major cities, particularly London, and mostly in teaching hospitals, usually with a large private practice as well. Some made occasional excursions to distant cities to see a few patients, have a nice lunch and return to London, satisfied with a good day’s work of making diagnoses but not much else. Of course, the thousands of patients with neurological problems never saw these famous men (and they were all men); they were looked after by general internal physicians, and by the emerging speciality of geriatricians who took on the strokes. Indeed, in the 1970s an argument was made, by non-neurologists, that neurologists were really rather . . . [Full text of this article]