In one of the unsurpassed medical works of the nineteenth century,1 2 Thomas Addison (1793–1860) when investigating a “peculiar form of anaemia” described the classic symptoms of adrenal cortical failure and found pathological changes in both “suprarenal glands”—Addison’s disease. The ill-fatedi Paul Ferdinand Schilder (1886–1940) in 1913 reported3 three cases of “encephalitis periaxialis diffusa”, characterised by diffuse involvement of the cerebral white matter in children with severe myelin loss, fat-laden phagocytes and gliosis, which resembled multiple sclerosis, and was named Schilder’s disease. The two conditions appeared unrelated until Haberfeld and Spieler reported the combination of bronzed …