Lucja Frey, 1919
Lucja Frey was born in 1889 in the Lemberg region of what was then the Austro–Hungarian Empire (which is now part of the Ukraine). While the education avaiable for girls was very limited at that time, her parents allowed her to continue her education through medical school.
Explore this issue:
August 2016In 1923, Dr. Frey published the description of one case of an auriculo-temporal syndrome, which later became known as ‘‘Frey syndrome.” Although some communications of an auriculo-temporal syndrome had been published earlier, Dr. Frey was the first to complete the entire description of anatomy pathology supposed pathogenesis and suggestions for treatment of the phenomenon.
Unlike her predecessors, Dr. Frey precisely described the constellation of symptoms in gustatory sweating, including warmth, flushing, sweating, and altered tactile sensation. She was the first to define gustatory sweating as a disorder of both sympathetic and parasympathetic innervations. Following the fact that physiologic secretion of the parotid gland is determined by both parasympathetic and sympathetic fibers, Dr. Frey carried on her drug experiments with pilocarpine, atropine, adrenalin, and physostigmine amyl nitrate and observed differences between both affected and unaffected sides of face.