Tourette’s disease was named in 1885, but The New York Times did not mention it until 90 years later.

In 1885, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist, published an article entitled “Study on a Nervous Affliction Characterized by Motor Incoordination and Echolalia and Coprolalia,” in the French journal Archives de Neurologie. The condition had been described by others as early as 1818, but Dr. Gilles de la Tourette had a devoted mentor, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, an accomplished neurologist whose students included Sigmund Freud and other soon-to-be-famous physicians.

Within a year, and with Charcot’s encouragement, the disorder was already being referred to in scholarly journals as “so-called Gilles de la Tourette’s disease.”

But The Times took no note. Gilles de la Tourette’s name first came up in the pages of the newspaper on Aug. 18, 1896, and then only in a description of an article the neurologist had written about a 1574 “Epidemic of Hysteria,” as the headline had it. There was no mention of Tourette’s disease.