Brain Storms: The Race to Unlock The Mysteries… is an excellent book to read for caregivers and family and friends of those with the disease. Told chronologically, the book begins with the namesake, James Parkinson discovering that he had tremors when walking. In 1817 James Parkinson wrote:
Essay on the Shaking Palsy in which he described the first symptoms he discovered that he himself experienced. A slight tremor in some part of his body, sometimes in the head, but most likely in the hands or arms (page 6.) This was the first known diagnosis of he yet to be named illness. The essay hadn’t received a wide audience and were it not for another doctor, the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot, Parkinson’s Disease may well have not been known for sometime later. Charcot discovered Parkinson’s essay in the 1860s. So we can thank Jean-Martin Charcot for expanding the study of and naming this illness after its “first known” patient.