Early Observations on Facial Palsy

Before Charles Bell's eponymous account of facial palsy, physicians of the Graeco-Roman era had chronicled the condition. The later neglected accounts of the Persian physicians Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari and Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakarya Rzi (Rhazes) and Avicenna in the first millennium are presented here as major descriptive works preceding the later description by Stalpart van der Wiel in the seventeenth century and those of Friedreich and Bell at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.