History of the Harvard Neurology Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
The Early Years of the Department of Neurology at Boston City Hospital
In the 1920’s the Department of Neurology at Harvard was located at Boston City Hospital. This was a hotbed of development of cognitive neuroscience under Stanley Cobb (who went on to found the first Department of Psychiatry at Harvard); EEG for neurological diagnosis in the hands of Fred and Erna Gibbs and William Lennox; and development of phenytoin as a treatment for epilepsy by H. Houston Merritt and Tracy Putnam. Tracy Putnam (both a neurologist and neurosurgeon and a nephew of J.J. Putnam) headed the Department of Neurology before moving to New York to head the Neurological Institute at Columbia.
