Ischias. Von der Säftelehre zur Pathomorphologie.

ABSTRACT

Today, lumbar disc disease is a very common disease, which will be often seen in both the family practice as well as in the consultations of orthopedics, neurology, rheumatology or neurosurgery. Furthermore, lumbar disc surgery is one of the most common spinal surgical procedures worldwide. But, for many centuries, physician had no clear understanding of the anatomical condition and the pathomechanism of this disease. Therefore, no rational treatment was available. The Hippocratic physicians knew the signs and symptoms of lumbar disc disease, which they then called "sciatica". But, they subsumed different disorders, like hip diseases under this term. In the mid-18th century, it was the Italian physician Domenico Felice Antonio Cotugno (1736-1822), who first brought clarity in the concept of radicular syndromes; he recognized, that the so-called "sciatica" could be of neurogenic origin. In 1742, a contemporary of Cotugno, the German Josias Weitbrecht (1702-1747) has to be credited for the first precise description of the intervertebral disc. Nearby a hundred years later, the German Hubert von Luschka (1820-1875) described for the first time a herniated disc in a pathologic specimen. With the landmark report of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1934, the two American surgeons, William Jason Mixter (1880-1958) and Joseph Seaton Barr (1901-1963), finally cleared the pathomechanism of lumbar disc disease.