Historical Note on Carotid Disease and Ligation

But he gave no distinctive report of carotid strokes. Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) in his De Sedibus (1761) showed extravasation of blood caused damage and laceration to the brain and cavities resulting in apoplexy [8] . Morgagni recognised the cerebral lesion as causing contralateral palsy. This was the first clear account of cerebral haemorrhage causing apoplectic stroke in distinction from earlier notions that apoplexy caused a vague deprivation of motion and impairment of consciousness. Until the late 1950s, undergraduate teaching told that a sudden hemiplegic stroke was commonly owing to thrombosis of the middle cerebral arteries or its lenticulostriate branches. Accounts of lesions in the carotid artery causing strokes with cerebral infarction, and retinal emboli had to await the latter half of the 20th century – notably in the work of C. Miller Fisher (1913–2012) [9, 10] . His 1951 article read: