EARLY AMERICAN PROFESSORSHIPS IN NEUROLOGY

American universities recognized and institutionalized the emerging im portance of neuroscience in medicine by establishing neurological prof essorships as early as the 1860s. Nearly 20 years before Charcot assum ed his celebrated chaired professorship for Diseases of the Nervous Sy stem in France, Harvard University created a professorship of Physiolo gy and Pathology of the Nervous System (1864), naming Brown-Sequard as its recipient. In 1867, the new Bellevue Hospital Medical School esta blished a combined neurology/psychiatry chair with William A. Hammond as professor, and the University of Pennsylvania created a clinical pr ofessorship devoted specifically to neurology in 1875, naming Horatio C. Wood. Although modest in their university power base and their clin ical research/laboratory programs, these American posts were internati onally unique for their time and solidly entrenched neurology as a spe cific division in early US medical education.