Henry Hun and his family: Three foundational stories in the history of nineteenth-century American neurology, part III. Henry Hun (1854-1924), a nineteenth-century academic neurologist's collision with the forces of twentieth-century American medicine.

Abstract

Along with his father Thomas (1808-96) and brother Edward (1842-1880), Henry Hun (1854-1924) was the final member of a family of physicians who helped establish the clinical specialty and academic discipline of neurology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Educated at Yale and with an MD from Harvard, he spent three years in Heidelberg, Vienna, and Paris, studying under Meynert and Charcot. On returning to the United States, he succeeded his brother as Albany Medical College's Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System, a title he held for the next three decades. He authored numerous papers and achieved national prominence as president of the American Neurological Association (ANA) in 1914. In 1897, he described the clinical and neuropathological correlations in a form of stroke that came to be known as Wallenberg syndrome. His most famous work was An Atlas of the Differential Diagnosis of the Diseases of the Nervous System, which went through three editions from 1913 through 1922. Following the upheaval produced by the Flexner Report of 1910, Hun abruptly resigned his academic position in 1914 and spent the final 10 years of his life in private practice.