Emerging Subspecialties in Neurology: Neuroinfectious diseases

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Infection as a cause of neurologic disease is a prominent feature in the history of medicine. The training of the practitioner called to care for these patients has changed throughout the years. To understand the history of infectious disease in neurologic practice, consider the relative infancy of the specialty of neurology in the United States. Neurology as an independent specialty board did not emerge from the cloak of neuropsychiatry and internal medicine until after World War II and the founding of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). Neuropathology was an integral part of the curriculum, and neuroinfectious diseases were taught primarily from the pathologic perspective. In 1964, H. Merritt 1 thought infectious disease was sufficiently important to be the subject of the first chapter in the third edition of his Textbook of Neurology. The increasing importance of infectious disease in neurology is evident from the more recent publication of dedicated textbooks on both pediatric and general neuroinfectious disorders. 2-4 Early practitioners in the field of neurology were first recognized for their work with neuroinfections. A major purpose of the Pasteur institute that opened in Paris in 1888 was to care for the multitude of patients with rabies. 5 In the same year, the first neurologist at Johns