The cerebellar examination evolved from observations of experimental lesions made by neurophysiologists and clinical descriptions of patients with trauma to the cerebellum. At the beginning of the 19th century, neurophysiologists such as Luigi Rolando, Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens, and John Call Dalton, Jr. ablated portions of the cerebellum of a variety of animals and observed staggering gait, clumsiness, and falling from side to side without loss of strength. They concluded that the cerebellum coordinated voluntary movements. In 1899, Joseph Francois Félix Babinski observed that patients with cerebellar lesions could not execute complex movements without breaking down into their elemental movements and described the defect as dysmetria. In 1902, Babinski coined the term dysdiodochokinesis to describe the inability to perform rapid execution of movements requiring alternate contractions of agonist and antagonist muscles. Gordon Holmes in 1904 described the phenomena of rebound, noting that if a limb ipsilateral to a cerebellar lesion is suddenly released from tension, the appendage will flail. In 1917, Gordon Holmes reported hypotonia and dysmetria in men wounded by gunshot wounds to their cerebellum. These observations were rapidly included in descriptions of the cerebellar examination in popular contemporaneous textbooks of neurology. Modern observations have demonstrated that the cerebellum influences such cognitive functions such as planning, verbal fluency, abstract reasoning, prosody, and use of correct grammar.

Animal Experimentation↗

PubMed2002

An American neurologist, pioneer of cerebral localization and treatment of aphasia.

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Aphasia↗

PubMed1991

Disappearance of thalamic pain after parietal subcortical stroke.

A hypertensive man had a long standing history of contumacious hyperpathia in the right upper extremity, resistant to medical therapy, secondary to a lacunar infarct in the left thalamus. A second cerebrovascular accident caused a small lesion in the left corona radiata, interrupting the thalamoparietal interconnections, and terminated the pain instantly. Interruption of the subcortical parietal white matter may more effectively control pain than cortical lesions. A few surgeons have successfully treated rebellious chronic pain with stereotaxic operations in the corona radiata, resulting in lesions very similar to our patient's. This overlooked and nearly forgotten technique may still have value in treating selected cases.

Cerebrovascular Disorders↗