Bernard<unk> , an American neurologist The<unk>  started with the development and acceptance of the evolution theory of disease in the 1860s and 1870s, the possibility that science could explain and even prevent or cure illness prompted medical doctors to undertake more precise description and diagnosis of disease. Waren<unk>  and Bernard<unk> , two physicians of the late 19th century described the progression of the disease precisely and provided differential diagnostic criteria to distinguish it from other neurological disorders with similar symptoms. Both<unk>  and<unk>  reported their first cases among Jewish families.<unk>  reported his observations in 1881 in the first volume of the proceedings of the British Ophthalmological Society, of which he was a founding member. By 1884, he had seen three cases in a single family. Years later, Bernard<unk> , an American neurologist, reported similar findings when he reported a case of "arrested cerebral development" to members of the New York Neurological Society.<unk> , who recognized that the disease had a familial basis, proposed that the disease should be called amaurotic familial idiocy. However, its genetic basis was still poorly understood. Although Gregor Mendel had published his article on the genetics of peas in 1865, Mendel's paper was largely forgotten for more than a generation, not rediscovered by other scientists until 1899. Thus, the Mendelian model for explaining<unk><unk><unk>  was unavailable to scientists and medical practitioners of the time. The first edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 12 volumes between 1901 and 1906, described what was then known about the disease: It is a curious fact that amaurotic family idiocy, a rare and fatal disease of children, occurs mostly among Jews. The largest number of cases has been observed in the United States—over thirty in number. It was at first thought that this was an exclusively Jewish disease, because most of the cases at first reported were between Russian and Polish Jews; but recently there have been reported cases occurring in non-Jewish children. The chief characteristics of the disease are progressive mental and physical enfeeblement; weakness and paralysis of all the extremities; and marasmus, associated with symmetrical changes in the macula lutea. On investigation of the reported cases, they found that neither consanguinity nor syphilitic, alcoholic, or nervous antecedents in the family history are factors in the etiology of the disease. No preventive measures have as yet been discovered, and no treatment has been of benefit, all the cases having terminated fatally. __TOC__
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