Raymond Delacy Adams (February 13, 1911 – October 18, 2008) [1] was an American
neurologist,
neuropathologist, Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at
Harvard Medical School and chief of neurology at
Massachusetts General Hospital.[2] Along with Maurice Victor, Adams was the author of Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology, the 12th edition of which appeared, 50 years after the original.[3]
Born near
Portland, Oregon, Adams was the son of William Henry Adams and Eva Mabel Morriss.[2] He graduated from the
University of Oregon with a degree in Psychology. He received his M.D. from the
Duke University School of Medicine in 1936.[4] Adams became chief of neurology at Massachusetts General in 1951 retiring in 1977. Adams had an encyclopedic knowledge of adult neurology, pediatric neurology, and neuropathology and is widely regarded as a pre-eminent neurologist of the mid-20th century. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955.[5] He helped found the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center for Mental Retardation.
In 1949, together with Joseph Michael Foley he described negative myoclonus[6] and in 1953 they coined the term
asterixis.[7] In 1963 the Australian neurologist
James Waldo Lance described together with him the posthypoxic myoclonus later called
Lance-Adams syndrome.[8] Adams, in collaboration with Dr. C. Miller Fisher, made contributions to the field of cerebrovascular disease, the syndrome of "transient global amnesia", and in 1965 he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the syndrome of "normal pressure hydrocephalus". Adams also first described central pontine myelinolysis.[9]
^Adams RD, Foley JM. "The neurological changes in the more common types of severe liver disease". Trans American Neurology Association 1949; 74: 217–19
^Adams RD, Foley JM. "The neurological disorder associated with liver disease". In: Merritt HH, Hare C, eds. Metabolic and Toxic Diseases of the Nervous System (Res Publ Assoc Res Nerv Ment Dis, Vol 32). Baltimore, Williams & Wilkins 1953: 198–237
^Lance JW, Adams RD. "The syndrome of intention or action myoclonus as a sequel to hypoxic encephalopathy". Brain 1963; 86: 111–36
Laureno, Robert (2009). Raymond Adams: A Life of Mind and Muscle, Oxford University Press
Adams RD, Fisher CM, Hakim S, et al., "Symptomatic Adult Hydrocephalus with Normal Cerebrospinal Fluid Pressure: A Treatable Syndrome", New England Journal of Medicine 1965; 273: 117–26.