shaking palsy

Today, however, we remember him for his landmark study of the affliction then called the "shaking palsy," but known ever since as Parkinson’s disease.

In 1817, the English surgeon James Parkinson reported that some patients with a condition he termed “shaking palsy” experienced constipation.

I wondered how could this man be forgotten when everybody knows his name, because he was the first to describe the shaking palsy condition that later became known as Parkinson’s disease?

Yet the term “shaking palsy” persisted until its last appearance in The Times as a synonym for Parkinson’s disease in an Associated Press dispatch on Nov. 3, 1983.

Her little old step-mother sat in a stuff chair covered with a sheep-skin; she sat there night and day, shivering with the shaking palsy.