Freud was an early researcher of cerebral palsy

Person: Sigmund Freud
Lived: 1856–1939
Field: Psychology
From: Austrian

The story

Long before he became famous for psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was a respected neurologist in Vienna. Born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, to a Jewish family, he trained in Ernst Brücke's physiology laboratory, worked at Vienna General Hospital from 1882, studied the anatomy of the brain, and in 1885 became a lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna. After a fellowship in Paris with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, he opened a private practice in 1886 specialising in nervous disorders. Among the conditions he studied was cerebral palsy, then known as cerebral paralysis.

The condition had been described since antiquity, but serious study began only in the nineteenth century. The English surgeon William John Little was the first to study it extensively, and the spastic diplegia form became known as Little's disease. Little argued that it resulted from problems around the time of birth, identifying difficult delivery, premature birth and lack of oxygen during birth as particular risk factors. In the 1880s William Gowers and William Osler built on his work, and many scientists still confused cerebral palsy with polio.

Freud published several medical papers on the condition. He showed that it had existed long before researchers of his own time began to study it. He also questioned Little's view that lack of oxygen during birth was the cause, suggesting instead that complications at birth might be a symptom of an earlier problem rather than its cause.

Freud also refined the classification of the disorder. He divided its causes into problems present before birth, problems that develop during birth and problems after birth. He drew a rough correlation between the location of damage in the brain and the limbs affected, and he documented the many kinds of movement disorder it could produce. His system of classification is still used today.

This work came during the years when Freud was building a substantial record of neurological research, including his 1891 book on aphasia. Cerebral palsy is now known as the most common movement disorder in children, affecting about 2.1 in every 1,000 live births. Freud's careful clinical observations, made before he turned to psychiatry, helped lay the groundwork for how doctors understand and classify it.