MS Through History
Eduard Rindfleisch (1836-1908)
Further insight into the pathophysiology of MS was provided by Eduard Rindfleisch, a 19th century German pathologist, who analysed post-mortem brain samples from MS patients.
In 1863 8, Rindfleisch reported a key finding that paved the way for theories of inflammatory involvement in the aetiology of MS. He noticed that, consistently in all the specimens, a blood vessel was present at the centre of each lesion. His illustrations of the plaques are shown here.
Rindfleisch wrote:
If one looks carefully at freshly altered parts of the white matter ...one perceives already with the naked eye a red point or line in the middle of each individual focus,.. the lumen of a small vessel engorged with blood...All this leads us to search for the primary cause of the disease in an alteration of individual vessels and their ramifications; All vessels running inside the foci, but also those which traverse the immediately surrounding but still intact parenchyma are in a state characteristic of chronic inflammation.
Rindfleisch came to believe that a primary state of inflammation was responsible for the demyelination.
A photograph of Rindfleisch from: http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/pathologie/Virchow/pathosum/rindfleisch.htm)
