ABSTRACT

Born in the kitchen of his uncle’s home in the small village of St. Gervais les Trois Clochers, George Albert Edouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904), like George Huntington and James Parkinson, was brought up in a family of doctors. His love of the ‘haunted’ town of Loudun, his ancestral home, strongly influenced his researches. Tourette was a French neurologist at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Charcot’s department in 1884, and in 1886 became his registrar. He was a man of great talent, subject to extraordinary activities and overexcitement. He wrote many books, research articles, communications, and historical papers in the fields of both neurology and psychiatry, including hysteria and hypnosis. In his later life, a young paranoid woman, confined to a mental hospital, shot Tourette three times in a consulting room. One of the bullets hit him in the head, and although it was removed he never really fully recovered (Stevens, 1971). Depressive episodes and mania manifested in his later years, and reports suggest that he most likely died from syphilis in 1904 (Guilly, 1982).