Leonid Ivanovich Omorokov (1881–1971)

Excerpt

Epilepsia partialis continua (EPC), also known as Kozhevnikov epilepsy (KE), was first described by A.Ya. Kozhevnikov (the father of Russian neurology) at the Moscow Neurological and Psychiatric Society meeting on 21 January 1894 as “A Particular Type of Cortical Epilepsy”, based on four cases [3, 10]. However, a subsequent but important early description of the condition was given in 1921 by L.I. Omorokov who in 1917 had become chair of the Department of Neurology at Tomsk University. He reported his findings to the same society 27 years after Kozhinikov, on the basis of 42 cases of EPC from the literature and 27 EPC patients he saw at his Siberian Clinic. Omorokov [5, 6, 8] reported that the disease usually began in childhood and affected mainly males (see also English translation of the 1922 article [1]). Furthermore, on the basis of neuropathological analyses, he agreed with Kozhenikov that the seizures had a cortical origin, which is in keeping with modern studies [7]. Omorokov [8] suggested a link between EPC and an infectious process and, in a later paper, concluded that most of his EPC patients had Russian spring–summer tick-borne encephalitis (the possible role of insects in the pathogenesis of EPC had been presented at the 1921 meeting mentioned above [7]). Omorokov also noted that EPC could be easily distinguished from the concurrent epidemic of encephalitis lethargica (hyperkinetic form) because the hyperkinesias were more uniform in the latter condition and also disappeared during sleep, whereas in the former the movements usually occurred in a single limb and continued during sleep. Today, EPC is considered a rare type of focal status epilepticus that may have vascular, immune-mediated, metabolic, or neoplastic origins [2]. …