Parkinson’s Disease, 1858
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Parkinson’s disease is second only to Alzheimer’s as the most common neurological illness in the United States, and its symptoms — rigidity, imbalance and uncontrollable shaking — are all too familiar. By the time James Parkinson formally described it in 1817, the illness had been known for centuries.
When The New York Times first mentioned the ailment, on April 5, 1858, it followed Dr. Parkinson’s example, calling it “chronic shaking palsy” in a roundup of news from Long Island. A man suffering from the disease, the report said, was baptized at a church in Brooklyn and the presiding minister “observed to him on his immersion: ‘In the highest and best of senses the Lord Jesus, my brother, healeth thee of all thy diseases.’ ”
Sometimes, presumably when the context required more formality, The Times used the medical term for the illness, “paralysis agitans” — for example, in a report about Civil War pensions published April 2, 1894.
The newspaper used “Parkinson’s disease” for the first time on Sept. 25, 1918, when it published a vivid account of the divorce proceedings of Charles S. Mellen, a former president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Company. Mr. Mellen’s lawyer asked for a delay because his client was “suffering from Parkinson’s disease, for which he was taking electrical treatments.” It is safe to say that those treatments were no more or less effective than the Brooklyn baptism.
The disease was mentioned again on Jan. 2, 1928, this time with some poignancy. “Sir Henry Head, the neurologist,” the special cable began, “has fallen victim to the mysterious, incurable disease on which he possibly is the greatest living authority — the form of creeping paralysis known as Parkinson’s disease.” Sir Henry died of the illness in 1940.
In the mid-1930s, the name Parkinson’s disease was still not common, and almost always required explanation. In an obituary on Feb. 22, 1935, for example, The Times wrote that a man “had suffered from the chronic progressive nerve ailment known as Parkinson’s disease.”
But if the name was still obscure to the general public, it was no mystery to people engaged in insurance fraud. On Oct. 14, 1936, The Times reported that a man had been arrested for falsely collecting $60,000 in disability insurance payments by pretending that “he had been stricken with a form of paralysis known as Parkinson’s disease.”
On Aug. 16, 1942, The Times printed a report about students at Western Reserve University who, as part of the war effort, were growing plants from which scopolamine could be derived. The drug, previously imported but unobtainable since the start of the war, was used “in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease” — a reference that by then could be made without explanation. The article was published with a photograph of six young women in short skirts lined up facing the camera, each brandishing a hoe and performing what appears to be an act of synchronized gardening.
Yet the term “shaking palsy” persisted until its last appearance in The Times as a synonym for Parkinson’s disease in an Associated Press dispatch on Nov. 3, 1983. Jane E. Brody mentioned the term in an article in 1985, but then only to mark its historical importance.
After that, a search for “Parkinson’s disease” in The Times database yields more than 2,400 entries, and “shaking palsy” yields but one. On Jan. 2, 2005, an article about the rare-book collection of the New York Academy of Medicine mentioned one of its prize possessions: an original 1817 copy of “An Essay on the Shaking Palsy,” by James Parkinson. NICHOLAS BAKALAR
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Also check out the New York Times Health Guide on Parkinson’s disease by clicking here.
