Historical View of the Interest in Intracranial Pressure

Abstract

Those of us who are old enough to have lived several decades of our lives before the onset of the Second World War, and whose training period therefore demanded much less of us bibliographically than is the case today, tend to be concerned over our younger colleagues. As we observe those working in the field of intracranial pressure, elaborately equipped with multiple strain gauges, amplifiers, radioisotopic tracers and other implements — and then see them faced with the inordinate demands of a burgeoning literature — we are concerned lest they fail to look back over their shoulder, and thus fail to employ that most useful scientific instrument, the retrospectroscope. Through such failure they risk repeating the errors of history. To be quite honest with you, my original intent as I began the preparation of this paper, was to preserve my listeners from that same risk. Thus I quite diligently and with no little personal profit reviewed a considerable portion of the literature on the cerebrospinal fluid. But my serious and pedantic interest was quickly dispelled when I faced compressing into a few pages the field that has already been so amply covered. Outstanding among reviews is the excellent historical section in Nils Lundberg’s monograph in the 1960 Acta [1], which is a model of bibliographic reporting. In 1962 there appeared the succinct and very readable and well illustrated “historical introduction” to the small text entitled The Anatomy of the Cerebrospinal Fluid by Millen and Woolam of Cambridge Univ [2].