The Classic

Olaus Jacob Ekman, chief surgeon to the Swedish Royal Cavalry Regiment of Southern Scane, defended his thesis for the degree of doctor of medicine before the faculty of medicine of the University of Upsala on May 10, 1788. His thesis,* a description of various cases of osteomalacia, contains the first account of hereditary bone fragility traced through three generations and includes a good description of the members afflicted with osteogenesis im-perfects. His account had been buried in the literature, unnoticed, until resurrected by Knud S. Seedorf. It has been translated and published by Seedorf as a part of his monograph on osteogenesis imperfects.** As an army surgeon, Ekman's career and even his life may have been consumed in the disastrous northern wars of Charles XII against Russia's Peter the Great. Johann F. Georg C. Lobstein (1777–1835) was born in Giessen, where his father was a professor of theology. He was educated in Strasbourg, and after serving in the revolutionary armies, received his degree of doctor of medicine in 1803. He specialized in obstetrics and pathological anatomy. In 1819, the University of Strasbourg established an Institute of Pathology, the first of its kind in France, and Lobstein was made Professor of Pathologic Anatomy. His major work, Traite d'anatomie pathologique, Paris and Strasbourg, 1829, 1833, contained a section in which he discussed the fragility of bones, or osteopsathyrosis. “Osteopsathyrosis is particularly remarkable at the extremes of life, infancy and decrepitude. In these age groups, the insufficiency of the bones can result in fractures. I have seen three children from the same family who, in the space of five years, had eight fractures of the arms and legs following trifling falls.” It is this comment that, until now, has been considered to be the first description of osteogenesis imperfecta. With the discovery of Ekman's earlier and more extensive description, Lobstein must be content to be known as the first to introduce the term “arteriosclerosis” into medical terminology.