ABSTRACT
The writings of Bailey, Bucy, Cushing, Penfield, and Verhoeff detail the early attempts to classify brain tumors including pilocytic astrocytomas. The terms spongioblastoma unipolare, spongioblastoma unipolare et bipolare, polar spongioblastoma, fibrillary astrocytoma, and protoplasmic astrocytoma were part of the original nomenclature for tumors that we now label as pilocytic astrocytomas (Bailey and Cushing, 1926; Bailey, 1927; Bucy and Gustafson, 1939; Penfield, 1931; Verhoeff, 1965). In 1898, Rosenthal reviewed an intramedullary spinal cord tumor associated with a gliotic syringomyelia and described the fibers, which would eventually become eponymously linked to him (Liber, 1937; Rosenthal, 1898).
