Armand Trousseau (1801-1867), a neurologist before neurology

Armand Trousseau is the emblematic figure of the prominent mid-19th century clinician, owing to the quality of his teaching and the influence of French medicine, which during his time brought students from around the world to Paris. A student of Pierre Bretonneau (1778-1862), the famous physician from the western French city of Tours, Trousseau carried forward Bretonneau's clinical description of infectious diseases, developing the notion of their contagion and paving the way toward the discovery of their microbial aetiology by Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) at the end of the century. His teachings, Les Leçons cliniques de l'Hôtel-Dieu, transcribed by his students, played a role in training young physicians for half a century. In this work, Trousseau covered several neurological diseases such as apoplexy, epilepsy, chorea, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The rich, Balzac-like detail of his clinical pictures would be unthinkable today. While he cannot be credited with any seminal descriptions in particular, some of his observations contain significant nuggets, such as a case of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, twenty years before the seminal publication. After a biographical account, we will present the main lessons given by Trousseau on neurological subjects. One of Trousseau's little-known contributions is to have invited Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875) to his department at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, setting Duchenne on the path to becoming a pioneer of Parisian neurology.