Dystrophia Muscularis progressiva

Abstract

It is a very great honour to be invited to participate in this symposium to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Erb, and in particular I am conscious of my inadequacy in being invited to discuss progressive muscular dystrophy, as this is a subject in the understanding of which Erb made remarkable advances; indeed it is one which in his day was peculiarly his own. Although in 1868 Duchenne had given an outstanding clinical description of the pseudohypertrophic paralysis of young boys, and Leyden (1876) and Möbius (1879) had also described a form of muscular weakness involving pelvic girdle muscles which appeared to be different from other forms of progressive muscular atrophy, it was the work of Erb (1883, 1884) which finally confirmed that this group of disorders, which he classified under the heading of „dystrophia muscularis progressiva“, was totally different, both clinically and anatomically, from progressive muscular atrophy of spinal origin with which it had previously been classified. It was Erb who finally convinced medical opinion of the day that dystrophy is a purely muscular affliction and is totally distinct from that group of disorders in which muscular wasting is secondary to anterior horn cell disease in the spinal cord. It is to my everlasting regret that owing to deficiencies in my early education, I have been unable to read Erb’S work in the original German, but we in Britain are fortunate in having available to us the lecture which he gave to the New Sydenham Society and which was published in the Proceedings of this Society in 1894 in an admirable translation by Dr. A. M. Stalker.