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The Birth of the journal NEUROLOGY

By William R. Kennedy M.D.

 

On two occasions, once at an AAN annual meeting and once at a University of Minnesota Neurology department’s famous dinners at Charlies Café Exceptionale, I heard Mr. Lou Cohen recount the below story about the beginning of Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

 

As President Dr. Joe Brown described in his January 1974 paper in Neurology (see the beginnings of the AAN in the Neurology in the USA section) the young leaders of the new Academy of Neurology realized in 1949, even before the first meeting in French lick, Indiana, that they would need a journal to publish the papers to be presented. Lou Cohen and his brother Jacob published Modern Medicine and Lancet in Minneapolis. Both played poker regularly with Dr. Abe Bert Baker (to become the first president of the AAN). Between poker hands Dr. Baker would seek advice about publication of the anticipated AAN papers, and as Dr. Brown described, several publishers were contacted. Increasingly mixed into the poker game were the insistent requests by Dr. Baker for the Cohen brothers to publish a journal for the AAN. Finally after months of increasing irritation Jacob told his brother Lou “Give Abe his G--D-- magazine”. So the “magazine” Neurology was born and for many years was published in Minneapolis due to the foresight and persistence of Dr. Baker.

W.R. Kennedy