W R Gowers 1895: two unpublished post-graduate lectures

On 10 May 1893, William Gowers began a series of weekly clinical demonstrations at the National Hospital for the Relief and Cure of the Paralysed and Epileptic at Queen Square, London. The contents of some of these demonstrations were published as 'Post-graduate Clinical Lectures' in the Clinical Journal, and in other learned periodicals. Some were also later included in his book Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System. Recently, the manuscripts of what appear to be verbatim transcripts of two further but unpublished demonstrations from Gowers' course in 1895 came to light, one containing alterations made in Gowers' handwriting. The first concerned a case of disseminated sclerosis and its differentiation from hysterical paraplegia, the second transverse myelitis and its consequences for bladder function. Why these lectures were never published remains uncertain, but their relatively unedited contents reveal something of the neurological knowledge, diagnostic reasoning, clinical examination and teaching methods employed by one of the great pioneers of clinical neurology.