“Neurologist”: Reply to Andrew Larner

An excellent recent etymological contribution by Andrew J. Larner in this journal ended by inquiring whether “neurologist” had attestations in the continental-European literature earlier than 1832 [1]. As Larner elaborates in his more recently published monograph, specialisation was a largely nineteenth-century development gradually consolidating such areas as “neurology” and “alienism” [2]. But it is not surprising and not uninteresting to, indeed, see explicit earlier allusions to nerve-experts in the continental-European literature, suggestive of an emergent professional and auctorial identity.

Neo-Latin neurologia was not hard to make up and was used over a decade before Thomas Willis’s (1621–1675) birth, indeed in a rough half-dozen attestations in Latin and French before 1664 [3]. “Neurologists” show up in French and German throughout the latter half of the 18th century. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) used Névrologues in 1751, for instance [4]. Italian anatomist Giovanni Battista Bianchi (alias Janus Plancus, 1681–1761) used the variant Névrologistes in a letter dated 24 July 1755 discussing sensibility, as an honorary epithet for Eustachi, Vesalius, Willis, and Vieussens (Raymond de Vieussens, 1641–1715) [5]. A 4-volume reader edited by Christian Friedrich Ludwig (1757–1823) reproduced and enhanced the work of “selected minor neurological writers”, Scriptores neurologici minores selecti (1791–5). In his preface to the first volume, Ludwig similarly looked back on older generations of such scriptores (“Galen, Vesalius, Eustachi, Willis, Vieussens and others have commented on the nerves”) but was more interested in the less “crude neurology” (nevrologia aucta) from the hand of more recent contributors including Giovanni Maria Lancisi and Alexander Monro Primus “among others” [6]. These references are suggestive of the recognition by this time of a genealogy of particularly meritorious contributors to the field of nerve anatomy, to whom generalists would have to turn for answers and from whom they indeed would now have to be able to expect answers. De La Mettrie, for instance, bemoaned that “neurologists” had not delivered (he claimed) on a particular vexing problem, tenesmus: “But what is this singular irritation of the rectal nerves that consumes the body in vain efforts, often for nothing, for a grain of velvet, or even mucus, and which, deceiving the will, always duped by the most illusory movements, persuades it that the body, however empty, is actually full, and that it will produce, as one might expect, a great quantity of filth? Why do other nerves, those residing elsewhere and likewise affecting sensation, not play with it in the same way? This is what neurologists and all our nerve-investigators [Névrologues, & tous nos fureteurs de Nerfs] will never discover.”

In English, “neurologists” occasionally show up not long after, perhaps first in a 1787 English translation by navy surgeon Joseph Skinner of a 1781 French work by Felice Fontana on toxinology [7]. Its 1787 German translation may have inserted the transliteration Nevrologisten into that language, incidentally. Another honorable mention is an 1824 discussion by John Bostock (1773–1846) of a dispute between whom Bostock called Hallerians and Neurologists (“as they have been termed”), concerning muscular fiber contraction being dependent on “nervous energy” or “nervous matter” [8]. Albrecht von Haller famously saw muscle contraction as an inherent, mechanical property of the muscle tissue itself, distinguishing between nerve function (sensibility) and muscle function (irritability). “Neurologists” were those defending a particular role for nerves, in this major debate animating the nerve-centered eighteenth century. As Bostock prominently cited Fontana in pertinent passages, we may entertain the idea of a linguistic inspiration here.

In German, occasional 1790s mentions of Nervenärzte reveal comparably divergent uses. According to some, “nerve-doctors” were those assuming a particular agency for nerves and were thus, although this was understood to be precarious, juxtaposed to “humoralists” (Humoralärzte). According to others, Nervenärzte were rather the most influential eighteenth-century nerve theorists, such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot (1728–1797) and in Scotland, Robert Whytt (1714–1766). In French, one sees much the same thing well into the nineteenth century: nervistes were those passing beyond ancient ideas of animal spirits, and took up new positions linking the “vital principle” to such early modern ideas as nervous fluid or electricity.

Of course, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of phrenologists, who claimed a distinct research niche and identity somewhat to the side of neurologists and psychiatrists. The term phrenist, without definition, one encounters in an 1813 English-Portuguese dictionary (I have not seen earlier usage). One finds believers more readily called phrénologues/phrénologes by the mid-1810s, and one can long find their creed weighed against that of magnetists and homeopaths, and of course anti-phrenologists.

Though the epithet “neurologist” was hardly indispensable to any of these works and clearly shows an early divergence of use, these references show that nerve-connoisseurship and nerve-centered hypotheses concerning both fundamental and particular physiological questions called for a specialty as yet in the making, in any case a specific branch of experimental solutions which were sorely missed at the time.

References

  1. Larner AJ. The origins of “neurology” and “neurologist”. Adv Clin Neurosci Rehabil. 2025. https://doi.org/10.47795/MTRH2044
  2. Larner AJ. The West Riding Asylum and the Origins of British Neurology 1866–1876: When Neurology Became a Science. Springer Nature, 2026:1. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-12591-0
  3. Janssen DF. The etymology of ‘neurology’, redux: early use of the term by Jean Riolan the Younger (1610). Brain. 2021;144(4):e38. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awab023
  4. de la Mettrie J-O. Œuvres de médecine. Fromery, 1751;1:76.
  5. Bianchi GB. Seconde lettre De M. Bianchi Président & Chef du Tribunal souverain de Médecine du Roi de Sardaigne sur la sensibilité & l’irritabilité des parties des hommes & des animaux adressée au Docteur Bassani. Recueil périodique d’observations de médecine, de chirurgie & de pharmacie 1756;4:163-171.
  6. Ludwig CF. Lectori benevolo s. editor. In: Scriptores neurologici minores selecti […]. Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Junius, 1791;1:v-vii.
  7. Fontana F. Treatise on the venom of the viper […]. London: J. Murray, 1787;2:387.
  8. Bostock J. An elementary system of physiology. London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1824;1:179 et passim.