The Pierre Wertheimer Neurological and Neurosurgical Hospital in Lyon: history of its development and contributions to neurosurgery

Abstract

At the end of the 1950s, at the direction of Pierre Wertheimer, the first French professor of neurosurgery, the treatment of neurological and neurosurgical diseases for Lyon’s 2 million people was concentrated in a single center functioning as not only a hospital but also a campus for neuroscience. The ideas behind the structure revolve around concepts such as spatial unity, comprehensive specialized fields, a critical mass of patients, a structured training program, and essential cross-communication between areas in the same field. Through several generations of doctors, researchers, and professors, the Pierre Wertheimer Neurological and Neurosurgical Hospital in Lyon (NHL) has had an important impact on clinical practice, fundamental neuroscientific research, and specialist training. Under Wertheimer’s stewardship, functional neurosurgery became one of the fields of excellence at the NHL with contributions in pain surgery and physiology but also epilepsy surgery and surgery for spasticity. Typically, these contributions were the result of the collaboration of separate teams, ultimately laying the groundwork for a neuroscientific doctoral school. The large mass of patients treated at the NHL provided opportunities for other, more isolated insights, such as the classification of pineal tumors and contributions to interventional neuroradiology. The present work endeavors to illustrate the contributions of the NHL to neuroscience and discuss the background allowing for their occurrence.