A Footnote to Medical History: David Alexander Shirres on Spinal Cord Regeneration

Extract

Little attention has been paid to an early Canadian experiment in neuronal regeneration and what may have been the world's first attempt to replace a damaged spinal cord with a transplant. In 1905, a paper entitled “Regeneration of the Axones of Spinal Neurones in Man” was published in the Montreal Medical Journal. It had been read at the Panamerican Congress in Panama. The author was David Alexander Shirres, a Scot who had trained in Aberdeen in neurology and neuropathology. He came to Canada in 1902 to assume the position of neurologist at the Montreal General Hospital, with the responsibility of establishing clinics and teaching undergraduates about the mysteries of the nervous system. To my knowledge, he was the first man in Canada to be appointed as a neurologist. (There were others, notably James Stewart, who devoted most of their time and writing to diseases of the nervous system but considered themselves to be internists. Stewart, for example, left the MGH to become the first chief of medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.)