The esteemed
Dr. Jim Mandell and his son were recently playing with the amazing
Google Books Ngram Viewer. Google Ngram searches a huge corpus of books for the mention of a particular search term. It then graphs the frequency with which that term appears over time. On a whim, the Mandell's entered the search term "neuropathologist". Here's the resulting graph:
I couldn't fit the y-axis label in the picture, but it ranges from 0% up to 0.00000300%. Dr. Mandell challenges his neuropathology colleagues to explain the sharp spike in the usage of "neuropathologist" around 1946-47. Please enter your speculations in the comment section. Dr. Mandell also points out the lamentable fact that it "appears we are past our peak".
3 comments:
Not sure if I'm on to something but ...in 1946--certification in pathology was formally recognized, CAP was founded and in 1947--first stereotactic neurosurgical procedure performed. In the early 1940s, AMA recognized pathology as practice of medicine (1943);first neurosurgical training programs and American board of Neurological surgery established. Bernd Scheithauer was born in 1946. Maybe he started publishing at a very early age :) Thanks for the blog
JNEN began in 1942.
It is likely just because WW II was over and a lot of medicine-related terminology other than war trauma would have come to the fore.
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