• Adrenoleukodystrophy

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realised who was telling me this.” Emo Phillips

Once upon a time, a budding neurologist would ‘write up’ an interesting or difficult case—a patient with an unusual and challenging presentation or disease course. The tyro would read a wide range of papers and trawl through hard copies year-to-year of Index Medicus to find previous similar or contrasting reports, and in doing so would often discover how shaky the foundations beneath textbook dogma were. The author would learn. The readers of journals—there were fewer journals then, made only of paper and frequently leafed through if not always read—would be updated and the gap between textbook …