Epidemic encephalitis

“By the late 1920s, New York City had emerged as the international center of encephalitis research. Interest in the disease, however, was informed as much by neurologists’ aspiration to reform their specialty and advance their status within the biomedical community as it was by their desire to solve the riddle of this novel infection. New York neurologists hoped to use the disease as a new investigative model that would link their work to the emerging professional field of public health through the bacteriologic laboratory (Kroker, 109). . . . Throughout the 1920s, New York neurologists, in concert with city health officials, rallied around the banner of encephalitis in the hope of creating an expansive research project that would establish their field on a new and relevant scientific footing” (121). This led to the establishment of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease in 1920 and the focus on encephalitis of the New York Academy of Medicine’s section on neurology and psychiatry in effort to reform how neurology was practice in NYC’s hospital system (126). By the early 30s, “the diagnosis of epidemic encephalitis nonetheless began to unwind. The lethargy and ocular paralysis that had originally defined the acute version of the disease had been largely displaced by insomnia in adults and behavior disorders in children . . . The universalizing aspiration of the New York City neurologists had failed. Epidemic encephalitis had aroused little sustained interest beyond the rarefied atmosphere of New York, and the disease remained a largely local affair (141-42).