While we now recognize that MS is a common neurological disease, as late as the early twentieth century it was considered a relatively rare condition in Europe and the United States. It was only in the late 1860s that MS came to be generally recognized as a distinct disease apart from other paraplegic maladies. One of the important historical questions about MS is whether it was a new disease of the nineteenth century or one that had simply gone unrecognized for a long time. Answering this question is complicated by the different frames or ways physicians understood and explained disease...
While we now recognize that MS is a common neurological disease, as late as the early twentieth century it was considered a relatively rare conditi...