History of Parkinson's disease

The history of Parkinson's disease expands from 1817, when British apothecary James Parkinson published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, to modern times. Before Parkinson's descriptions, others had already described features of the disease that would bear his name, while the 20th century greatly improved knowledge of the disease and its treatments. PD was then known as paralysis agitans. The term "Parkinson's disease" was coined in 1865 by William Sanders and later popularized by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.