In modern neurological practice, textbooks/journals are now almost exclusively consulted in “electronic format”. Does this mean that the traditional printed textbook/journal is useful only as an historical curiosity?

If the neurological textbook/journal has been consigned to history, it is of value to study the historical evolution of this printed format.

The first texts appeared as treatises, dealing with a specific category of disease eg James Parkinson’s Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) or John Cooke’s A Treatise of Nervous Disease: Apoplexy, Epilepsy and the Palsy (1820), and reflected the author’s in-depth clinical experience.

In the mid 19th century, neurologists tended to publish their experiences as collections of lectures, previously delivered to medical students, such as Robert Bentley Todd’s Clinical Lectures on Paralysis, Diseases of the Brain and other affections of the Nervous System (1855) or the famous lectures of Charcot.

In the later 19th century, reference texts organized according to anatomical diseases evolved such as the popular text of William Gowers, A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System (1888).

During the 20th century, with the rise of clinical neurology as a special discipline, the trend towards institutional publications can be identified, represented by Merritt, Metler and Putman’s Fundamentals of Clinical Neurology (1947), identified as the first to outline a systematic neurological examination.

This paper will discuss and illustrate the development during the 19th and 20th centuries of the traditional paper format for the “getting of neurological wisdom”.