In the last decades of the 19th century, the leading physicians of the world came to understand that MS was a specific disease. MS was recognized in England by Dr. William Moxon in 1873, and in the United States by Dr. Edward Seguin in 1878. By the end of the century, much of what can be learned about MS from careful observation was known: that the disease is more common in women than men, that it is not directly inherited, and that it can produce many different neurological symptoms.

But observation can go only so far. Knowledge of MS could not advance without deeper understanding of biology and better research tools. The very existence of the immune system was unknown. Doctors of the time assumed the same disease rarely struck the same person twice because a disease “used up” the materials in the body it needed to live, much the way crops use up soil nutrients and die unless they are rotated.

In the 19th century, scientists first learned that bacteria cause many diseases. As the 20th century began, they discovered even smaller organisms, viruses, and developed techniques for growing and studying bacteria and viruses in the laboratory.

In 1906, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Dr. Camillo Golgi and Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who perfected new chemicals to enhance the visibility of nerve cells under the microscope. Equipped with this new technology, Dr. James Dawson at the University of Edinburgh in 1916 performed detailed microscopic examinations of the brains of patients who had died with MS.

Dr. Dawson wrote a description of the inflammation around blood vessels and the damage to the myelin with a clarity and thoroughness which has never been improved upon. But so little was known about the brain’s function that the meaning of these changes could only be guessed at.

Reference

Written by Loren A. Rolak, MD. Reproduced by permission from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, USA. © NMSS, 2003