Charles Dickens, author of the Christmas Carol, is credited with some profoundly accurate descriptions of several neurological diseases.
Dickens has long been recognized as a skillful and accurate chronicler of human behavior. His characters are rendered with a realist’s dedicated, unstinting eye. Physician readers of Dickens’s stories have commented on the precision with which he portrays his characters’ quirks and oddities — many of which are now recognized as disease states. Some of his most memorable characters are virtual case studies of diseases that were not described or understood until long after Dickens’s time.
He is credited with the first description of an individual with Progressive supranuclear palsy…
