William Barnett Warrington (1869–1919) was a physician and physiologist working in Liverpool, United Kingdom, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. His training included periods at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square, London, and in the Liverpool laboratory of Charles Scott Sherrington. He investigated structural alterations in nerve cells following various nerve lesions and helped to develop laboratory facilities to support clinical practice through the Pathological Diagnosis Society of Liverpool. His clinical interests were broad, but his main focus seems to have been in disorders of the peripheral nervous system. He published many papers, encompassing descriptions of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, brachial plexus paralyses (possibly including neuralgic amyotrophy), and, in the context of the First World War, traumatic peripheral nerve injuries. He may have described cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome prior to the eponymous description but despite being familiar with the technique of lumbar puncture, he did not report cerebrospinal fluid findings in these patients.

Keywords:
Ascending paralysis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, Lumbar puncture, History of neurology, Sherrington, William Warrington
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2019
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