The experiments behind the Tullio phenomenon.

BACKGROUND: Professor Pietro Tullio was a director at the Laboratory of Experimental Physiology in Bologna during the early twentieth century. His experimental studies resulted in the description of the Tullio phenomenon, which is characterised by sound-induced vertigo and/or eye movements. OBJECTIVE: The experimental studies behind his contribution to vestibular physiology are described within this paper, as are some of the further developments that have been made.

A historical vignette (13). "Who are you, Nystagmus"? A semantic and historical approach.

"Who are you, Nystagmus?" A semantic and historical approach. Initially, the need to name nystagmus was logically satisfied by the use of the metaphor of a galloping horse, "hippus". Later, nictatio, oeil d'hypocrite and souris embodied the presumed connection between blinking and the rhythmic involuntary movements of the eyeball. Blinking was also considered by Boissier as an inseparable companion of the unsteadiness of the eyeballs. Since drowsiness is a good example of a state accompanied by blinking, it makes sense, strange though it may seem, to use the Greek word for drowsiness, "nustagmos", to refer to the instable movement of the eyeballs. From a poetic point of view and in the light of the rapid phase of the phenomenon, nystagmus can be thought of as "a modern Sisyphus, the operator of the eternal return".

Temperamento e hipertensión arterial. Divertimento / Temperament and arterial hypertension. Divertissement

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William Charles Wells (1757-1817) and vestibular research before Purkinje and Flourens.

Vestibular research before Flourens typically involved vertigo and eye movements. In 1820 Purkinje integrated these in studies of postrotary vertigo and he is linked with Flourens as a founder of vestibular research. In the late eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin described vertigo in detail, but he did not accept that it involved an oculomotor component. Darwin reached this conclusion despite detailed experiments by William Charles Wells (1757-1817), who described the pattern of postrotary nystagmus and its dependence on head orientation during rotation. Wells generated afterimages prior to rotation and subsequently compared their motions with those of real images. He was able to distinguish between the slow and fast phases of nystagmus, its reducing amplitude following cessation of rotation, its suppression with fixation, and its torsional dimension. In many ways, Wells's experiments were more sophisticated than those of Purkinje, and he should be recognised as a founder of vestibular research. Possible reasons for the neglect of Wells's work are discussed.

Rezsö Bálint and his most celebrated case.

In 1907, Rezsö Bálint (1874-1929), a young Hungarian physician, recorded observations he had made on a patient who suffered from a remarkable constellation of symptoms--fixation of gaze, neglect of objects in the visual surround, and misreaching--following damage to the posterior parietal lobes. Although Bálint's syndrome, the name now given to these disorders of attention and visuomotor control, is well established in the neurologic literature, there remain problems of interpretation. Bálint's own attempts to understand exactly what was wrong with his patient offer a unique insight into the nature of neurologic thought at the beginning of this century.