Early Observations on Facial Palsy

Abstract

Before Charles Bell's eponymous account of facial palsy, physicians of the Graeco-Roman era had chronicled the condition. The later neglected accounts of the Persian physicians Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari and Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi ("Rhazes") and Avicenna in the first millennium are presented here as major descriptive works preceding the later description by Stalpart van der Wiel in the seventeenth century and those of Friedreich and Bell at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

My Cheek Puff Sign: Bell'S Palsy, Charles Bell and Dr Robert Knox

“…Although he was the fi rst to demonstrate that facial palsy is due to a lesion of the seventh cranial nerve, the clinical condition had long been described by many of the medical greats of the fi rst millennium, such as Celsus, Avicenna and Razi. 7 Artefacts picturing facial palsy have been found in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Pre-Columbian America. 8…”