A History of Multiple Sclerosis (review)

Reviewed by: A History of Multiple Sclerosis Daniel J. Wilson Colin L. Talley. A History of Multiple Sclerosis. Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. xvii + 201 pp. Ill. $49.95, £27.95 (978-0-275-99788-5). Historians of medicine have recently turned their attention to multiple sclerosis (MS), a neurological disease marked by difficulty walking, muscle weakness and numbness, and sometimes blindness. MS is now recognized as an autoimmune disease of the brain and spinal cord that causes the destruction of the myelin sheath protecting the nerves and leading to the interruption of nerve impulses and the consequent symptoms. Perhaps 400,000 individuals in the United States and 2.5 million worldwide have MS. Historical evidence suggests that MS has afflicted humans since at least the fourteenth century, but only in the nineteenth century did neurologists differentiate MS from other neurological conditions that caused similar symptoms. Four years ago, T. Jock Murray’s Multiple Sclerosis: The History of a Disease (2005) explored in considerable detail medicine’s efforts to understand and treat this disease. Murray, a Canadian neurologist, also described historical examples of likely MS cases going back to 1395. Colin L. Talley’s short book covers some of the same ground as Murray’s, but Talley focuses instead on the “interaction of society, culture, politics and medical institutions with the organic and material experience of the disease” (p. xvii). In addition to the clinician’s and scientist’s perspectives, Talley provides some insight into the experiences of men and women who have the disease. Talley begins by briefly surveying the emergence of MS as a distinct neurological disease in the nineteenth century. Although he mentions many of the same cases and experimental discoveries as does Murray, Talley’s accounts are much briefer. Talley’s book emphasizes the period following Jean Martin Charcot’s discovery of the characteristic lesions in the spinal cord of individuals with the symptoms of MS. Throughout the book Talley stresses the historical context in which such discoveries were made. For example, Charcot made his discovery because working at Salpêtrière in Paris, he was the first physician to follow patients over the course of their illness in the hospital and then to autopsy their bodies after death. Talley also argues that part of the reason for the emergence of MS as a more widespread disease in the twentieth century was the rise of neurology as a medical specialty and the consequent increase in the number of highly trained neurologists who [End Page 410] could identify this hard-to-diagnose illness. So too, Talley demonstrates how the 1946 establishment of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS), which was modeled on the very successful National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), enabled patients and patient advocates to play an important role in fundraising, in shaping research and clinical priorities, and in framing how individuals with MS thought about the disease and themselves. He also explores the experience of having MS in the second half of the twentieth century largely through patient interviews in the social science literature of the period. Talley’s history could have been stronger had he drawn on the growing number of published MS narratives and memoirs to expand his account of what it was like to live with the disease in the past half century. In addition, a more substantial comparison of the NMSS and NFIP could have shed light on how the differences between polio and multiple sclerosis had an impact on their respective advocacy organizations. Still, Talley’s emphasis on the intersections of society, politics, economics, medical institutions, and patients’ needs and demands gives the reader considerable insight into physicians’ understanding of the disease, the treatment of MS patients, and the experience of having the disease in the late twentieth century. Readers not needing Murray’s detailed account of the science and medicine of MS will find Talley’s book valuable. Daniel J. Wilson Muhlenberg College Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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