France

Abstract

The first description of traumatic spinal injury in the French literature was by Ambroise Paré (1510–1598). Nearly a century and a half was to elapse until Jean Louis Petit (1674–1750) and Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835), made a clinico-pathological study of traumatic spinal injuries. This was followed, in the first half of the nineteenth century, by the work of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875) and Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1894) when as part of their general neurological studies, they described injuries of the spinal cord, delineated the pathological changes and correlated them with symptoms and signs. They also applied their patho-physiological findings to the treatment of patients with spinal injuries, particularly in investigating the development of pressure sores.