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	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor.—Dr Kivelä and colleagues¹ report a previously overlooked account, by the 16th-century Dutch anatomist Pieter Pauw, of diabetes insipidus in a patient whose autopsy showed the presence of a cystic mass at the optic chiasm. Their excellent analysis, placing the case in historical and neuropathological context, is a valuable contribution to the history of medicine. It also illustrates the usefulness of a carefully performed and accurately recorded autopsy, even in a climate of primitive scientific notions and invalid theories.

Pauw's Latin syntax is at least as muddled as that of his English contemporary William Harvey, and in addition, he uses a Greek adverb where a predicate adjective is called for. Instead of translating this word, anarrhopos, which appears in the next-to-last sentence of Pauw's report, Kivelä and colleagues attempted a paraphrase, "the ability to balance it up," in brackets.

Here the authors apparently were misled by . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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RELATED ARTICLE

Diabetes Insipidus and Blindness Caused by a Suprasellar Tumor: Pieter Pauw's Observations From the 16th Century
Tero Kivelä, Risto Pelkonen, Matti Oja, and Olli Heiskanen
JAMA. 1998;279(1):48-50.
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