Édouard Brissaud

Édouard Brissaud (1852 to 1909) was a French physician and pathologist who trained under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. His interests ranged across disorders of movement, anatomy, neurology and psychiatry. In 1881 he studied one of the earliest diagnosed cases of tuberous sclerosis together with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, and the condition carries both their names. He gave a detailed description of what is now called Tourette syndrome in 1896, described infantile myxedema as true infantilism in 1907, and described a form of scoliosis seen in sciatica in 1895. Several signs and syndromes still carry his name, among them Brissaud's reflex and, with the neurologist Jean-Athanase Sicard, the Brissaud-Sicard syndrome of hemiparesis with contralateral facial spasm. He published lectures on nervous diseases and died of a brain tumour at the age of fifty-seven.