‘Spinal amaurosis’ (1841). On the early contribution of Edward Hocken to the concept of neuromyelitis optica

The idea of “sympathetic connections” strikingly reminds of theories that would be put forth about 30 years later by Thomas Wharton Jones (1808–1891) and others who would ascribe the occurrence of visual disturbances in patients with spinal cord diseases to involvement of the sympathetic nervous system, which was thought to confer secondary, trophic damage to the optic nerve by compromising its blood supply [43]. It is possible that Hocken was aware of Jakob Henle’s (1809–1885) and Benedict Stilling’s (1810–1889) seminal works on the vasomotor system, which had appeared the year before, i.e. in 1840. However, Hocken’s article predates the important discoveries of Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1894) on that topic by a decade [1]. It should not go unmentioned that Allbutt would use a similar wording in his famous 1870 lecture On the ophthalmoscopic signs of spinal cord disease, where he mentioned a patient with acute myelitis and a “sympathetic eye disorder”, which until very recently was considered the first account of NMO [3]. However, it seems that Allbutt, who strongly opposed Wharton Jones’s theory, used the term ‘sympathetic’ here in a more general sense, i.e. to refer to “[a] disorder induced in a person, or in an organ or part of the body, by a similar or corresponding one in another” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989) [3].