INTRODUCTION
Available data concerning various neurologic disease entites occuring in West African are still appalling scanty, such that a vigorous effort seems urgently essential in the next few years to. rectify this lag. In various part of Nigeria, like much elsewhere in Africa, much neurologic problems presently remain inadvertently negelected for the more pressing consideration of the common tropical diseases and general surgical emergencies. It can be safely presumed that every day there are innumerable illnesses of the nervous system, unrecognized and untreated, that go down in these parts with many a patient, hidden in the remote villages or lost forever irretrievably into the many unmarked graves.
The work of Monekosso on the endemic tropic myelopathies in Nigeria is familiar to West African medical readers. The transactions of Collomb et al. In Dakar on entities such as intracranial tumors, vascular malformations and abscesess in Africans are well commendable. In a recent brief study of “The Pattern of Neurological Disease in Ibadan” published by KAUSHIK (1961), another noteworthy beginning has been made in a useful direction. It is hoped that these landmark efforts will, by the paucity made apparent thereby, serve to provoke more clinicians in these areas into a determined effort for bringing verified neurologic disease of all types into light.
The purpose of this communication is to introduce the presence of Neurological Surgery as a defined discipline to Nigeria and to the West African Medical scene.