"In 1818, Leopold Anton Gölis (1765-1827, Austrian physician and pathologist), a paediatrician and dissector in the Institute for the Sick Children of the Poor in Vienna, described the clinical and autopsy findings of many children affected by hydrocephalus, opening 180 bodies that died of this disease. Due to Gölis' great experience with children, he described hydrocephalus in a 35-year-old man, case XXXVI, with 8 ounces (240 cc) of serum in the brain ventricles and refers to three old patients affected by hydrocephalus but lacking the typical paediatric external cranial vault alterations (Gölis, 1815, 1818)."

"The clinical picture of idiopathic adult hydrocephalus was very slowly delineated in the literature. The history of Jonathan Swift is suggestive of the clinical picture and autopsy findings of idiopathic adult hydrocephalus. Yet, the early descriptions of idiopathic adult hydrocephalus are pathological findings in asymptomatic patients (Morgagni, Baillie, Heberden Jr). Gölis, due to his experience with paediatric hydrocephalus, was the first physician who clearly associated hydrocephalus with adult patients, recognizing the possible cause of progressive neurological impairment. Moulin, Dörner and Andral gave us early outstanding descriptions of symptoms related to idiopathic adult hydrocephalus. The most detailed triad of symptoms in idiopathic adult hydrocephalus was related by French neurologists in 1950; they summarized the clinical picture characterized by progressive walking, cognitive, and urinary impairment, which for the first time were confirmed with the radiological picture of enlarged ventricles. The Dorothy Russel's point of view was adopted in 1964 by McHugh. Indeed he put the adult congenital together with idiopathic adult hydrocephalus assuming a decompensation in adult life of a long-standing congenital hydrocephalus" (Paolo Missori Sergio, Paolini Antonio Currà, "From congenital to idiopathic adult hydrocephalus: a historical research," Brain, 133/6 (2010)1836-1849).

Translated into English by Robert Gooch as A treatise on the hydrocephalus acutus, or inflammatory water in the head (London, 1821). Digital facsimile of the 1820 second edition in German from the Internet Archive at this link.