Reflections: a historical vignette.

Abstract

vignette is a diminutive of vigne (vine) and at first was used in the form of a vine branch, e.g., to begin or end a chapter in a book or to frame a medieval miniature. By extension, it has taken on the meaning of image. This stereotactic vignette is by no means a historical account of functional stereotactic neurosurgery in the 1960s, but it is through a description of the evolution of my relationships with close colleagues in those early years that I attempt to recreate the atmosphere and medical dreams of this group of doctors, who were somewhat outside the mainstream of neurosurgery at that time.