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I. The Muscular Dystrophies

Tetsuo Furukawa, MD; James B. Peter, MD, PhD

JAMA. 1978;239(15):1537-1542.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

THE MUSCULAR dystrophies may have a history dating back many centuries. Pöch and Becker¹ suggested that one of the ancient Egyptian sculptures (around 1500 BC) represented persons possibly affected with muscular dystrophy. However, medical descriptions of the disease appeared in the 19th century, which included probably the first recognizable clinical description by Charles Bell² in 1830, the pathological observations by Partridge³ in 1847, and the meticulous definition of clinical and autopsy findings by Meryon⁴ in 1852.

After several distinguished descriptions of the disorders by Duchenne,⁵ Gowers,⁶ Landouzy and Déjèrine,⁷ and others, Wilhelm Erb⁸ published his classical article, which clearly established the disease as an entity. He coined "dystrophia muscularis progressiva" for this disease. The term was subsequently modified slightly to "dystrophia musculorum progressiva."

A great deal of knowledge concerning muscular dystrophies has been accumulated for a century. Progress of research on the muscular . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Department of Medicine, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles. Dr Furukawa is now with the University of Tokyo Faculty of Medicine, Tokyo.

Footnotes
This is part 1 of two parts. Part 2 will be published in the April 21, 1978, issue of The Journal.

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