Clot described symptoms of what he called “spinitis” (Fig. 2). Setting in rapidly with fever or more slowly, “paralysis in the limbs, swelling of the belly, the accumulation of urine in the bladder”, and pain “along the spine” characterised, for him, a disease of the spinal cord. He distinguished between a slow progressive onset with paralysis and cases where it was complete and immediate even though, in all cases, during autopsy he found pus and bone lesions, which he linked explicitly to