[Andreas Christian Bull (1840-1920) and his survey of poliomyelitis]

Andreas Christian Bull was a Norwegian district physician who started his medical career in 1867. Contemporary physicians' interests were focused upon the cause of the diseases they encountered. Infectious diseases were dominating. The official opinion was that the cause could be a coincidence, relating to natural phenomena and bad sanitation, though some held the view that epidemic diseases were developing from contagious substances. Bull was an acute observer. In a medical report from 1868, he describes a peculiar epidemic disease diagnosed as meningitis cerebrospinalis acuta. He treated 14 patients, 12 of them children. His report is a comprehensive description of a poliomyelitis epidemic and the different states of the disease. At the time, physicians had no knowledge of an infectious disease localised in the spinal marrow. Bull's report was the first description of a poliomyelitis epidemic in Europe. In 1882 he published a report about trichina poisoning, the first diagnosis of trichinosis in human beings in Norway.