London, the night of December 21st at the end of the 19th century. After years of medical practice, James Parkinson reviews his publication An Essay on the Shaking Palsy. He is tormented by the fact that the description of this new disease is not rigorous and is based only on conjectures and vague observations.
Dong, dong, dong! Big Ben announces the new hour in the distance, and a shadow appears in the room. They converse, and James opens up, confessing his fears. She, benevolent, grants him the opportunity to travel into the future to find answers to the doubts that torment him so much.
Hand in hand with this unexpected visitor, James Parkinson will visit different scenarios across various periods of history linked, in some way, to his publication: At the end of the 19th century, Jean-Martin Charcot coins the term “Parkinson’s disease” in his honor and alleviates his patients with his “shaking chair.” In the early 20th century, Konstantin Tretiakoff discovers that brain injury is due to the loss of neurons in the substantia nigra, which contain abundant Lewy bodies. By the late 1950s, Arvid Carlsson discovers that a dopamine deficit is the cause of the motor disturbances of the disease. A few years later, Oleh Hornykiewicz and Walther Birkmayer, and later George C. Cotzias, will demonstrate that levodopa, a precursor of dopamine, can improve the mobility of Parkinson’s patients. From that moment on, levodopa becomes the main treatment for the symptoms of the disease, marking the beginning of an intense research phase to rationalize the treatment and adapt it to the reality of each Parkinson’s patient.
A journey through time that reveals how understanding Parkinson’s disease depends, of course, on advances in technology and science, but also highlights that intuition is an indispensable element for a hopeful future.
