ABSTRACT
A brief history of Huntington’s disease Huntington’s disease (HD) is named after the American physician George Sumner Huntington (1850-1916) who provided an early description of the disease in 1872. In fact, there are a number of possible descriptions of the disorder in the literature preceding Huntington’s paper. The first definite record of HD was in a letter by Charles Oscar Waters, published in 1842. It is highly likely, however, that HD has been with us for quite some time. Indeed, a vivid portrait of what looks very much like HD may be found in Pieter Brueghel’s drawing of the St John’s dance, a mixed pagan-Christian ritual serving as a defense against ‘St John’s disease’, which dates back to the fourteenth century and the time of the Black Death.
