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T. Jock Murray. Multiple Sclerosis: The History of a Disease. New York: Demos, 2005. xi + 580 pp. Ill. $29.95 (paperbound, 1-888799-80-3).
Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects perhaps as many as 2.5 million people worldwide, and it is one of the most important problems in neurology. Because of the prominence of the disease, it is surprising that this volume is the first published booklength history of MS. T. Jock Murray, a professor of neurology and director of the Dalhousie MS Program at the Dalhousie Medical School in Halifax, Nova Scotia, provides a much-needed historical overview. The book is a narrative history, based mainly on published medical literature, with two main goals: The first is to argue, through retrospective diagnoses, that MS was not a new disease of the nineteenth century; rather, it has been with us for a long time. The second is to give credit to notable physicians and scientists for priority of description and discovery in the scientific history of the malady.
Murray points out that in previous centuries there were people with symptoms similar to those found in MS, such as paralysis, numbness, and dizziness-but physicians had a much different nosology for categorizing disease in earlier times and...