Thymus and myasthenia gravis. pathophysiological and clinical features

Abstract

In 1672 Thomas Willis published a book, De anima brutorum in which he wrote about a woman who temporarily lost her power of speech and became mute as a fish [1]. This has been interpreted as being the first written description of myasthenia gravis (MG). Others give credit to Wilks for the first report of disease in 1877, characterized as a bulbar palsy without anatomic lesion [2]. The first reasonably complete accounts were those of Erb in 1878 and Goldflam in 1893 [3, 4] and for many years thereafter, the disorder was referred to as the Erb- Goldflam syndrome. Jolly was the first to use the name myasthenia gravis in 1895 and to demonstrate the myasthenic reaction of muscle repeatedly stimulated by Faradism [5], introducing the basic criteria of instrumental techniques of MG diagnosis, the repetitive nerve stimulation, elaborated later by Desmedt [6]. © 2008 Springer Milan.