It is a great privilege to be allowed to participate in this fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Neurological Institute, and a great source of pride to me that my friend, Dr. Houston Merritt, should have invited me to talk to you about the present and future of neurology. No one has striven more to enhance the prestige of neurological medicine in this country than he has done.
We cannot easily discuss the present and future of clinical neurology without some reference to its past; to its roots and trunk. It is, I think, fair to say that modern neurological medicine really stems from the early nineteenth century, at the time when, in 1818, Laennec, in Paris, founded clinical investigation as we know it and correlated is with pathology. Neurological medicine began as a clinicopathological discipline, and so in a sense it still essentially is, though it has now become more