It was another century before anything more was published about the disease. In 1912 Frederick Lewy described inclusions, or clumps of proteins, inside certain neurons in the brains of people who had died of Parkinson’s disease. Then in 1919 Konstantin Tretiakoff, a Russian medical student in Paris, described the substantia nigra, a part of the brain that he thought was involved in Parkinson’s disease (fig. 7.1). The substantia nigra, or black substance, appears as a dark band on each side of the midbrain. It gets its color from a compound called neuromelanin, which we now know is derived from
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