Introduction

Abstract

There is hardly any book on Parkinson’s disease which starts without reference to the “Essay on the shaking palsy”, in which James Parkinson, in 1817, first described this disorder of motor function. We would propose the first therapeutic advance to be that of Charcot (1892), who introduced treatment with the Solanaceae. This Atropa belladonna medication was practically the only available treatment until the introduction of the synthetic anticholinergic drugs (Sigwald et al. 1946). While the first autopsy finding was of a post-apoplectic cyst in the right thalamus (Oppolzer 1861), the decisive neuropathological observation was the description of a case of Parkinson’s disease with a tubercle of the substantia nigra (Blocq and Marinesco 1894).