Visiting Physician to the Roentgen-Ray Department, Presbyterian Hospital NEW YORK "Death seems to be the only object of hope and consolation in all such deplorable cases, as the unhappy patient must be frequently subject to pains, spasms, and occasional dereliction of the faculties, both of body and mind, which. .. are likely to terminate ... in palsy, mania, idiotism or other maladies more grievous than death itself." Such was the comment of Dr. J. Smith 1 in a letter, written in 1780, to William Hunter, referring to ossification of the meninges, which he had discovered, postmortem, in a recent case. In that period of medical practice, such a pathologic finding sufficed to explain the most grotesque and most divergent clinical findings. Paralyses, chorea, epilepsy, a wide range of psychotic manifestations and feeble-mindedness, constitute a few of the maladies to which Dr. Smith referred. *Read at the forty-seventh annual meeting of the American Neurological Association, Atlantic City, N.
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