A brief history of parkinsonism

The growth of our knowledge of Parkinson's disease over the past 175 years represents an enormous and at times stormy intellectual voyage. It required the contributions of many scientists and clinicians in many disciplines, and its progress inevitably reflected the general progress of biomedical science over the past 2 centuries. The advances in the past half century clearly depended on the great advances achieved in that time in histochemistry, neurochemistry, and neuropharmacology as well as in clinical neurology and neuropathology. Advances in the future will similarly depend on progress in modern neuroscience.