DUCHENNE MUSCULAR-DYSTROPHY - MERYONS DISEASE

In a communication to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London in December 1851, which was published in the Transactions of the Society the following year, Edward Meryon, an English physician, described, in considerable detail, eight boys in three families with a disease later referred to as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He was particularly impressed by the predilection for males and its familial nature, and that the progressive muscle wasting and weakness was essentially due to a disease of muscle and not the nervous system. His detailed histological studies revealed no abnormality of the spinal cord or nerves but in muscle tissue he noted extensive ''granular degeneration'' and in particular that the sarcolemma was broken down and destroyed. He appears to have been the first physician to make a detailed clinical, genetic, and pathological study of the disorder several years before Duchenne.