How Quincy M.E. Changed Medical History

For decades, Americans suffering from ‘orphan diseases’ struggled to get their voice heard. Then Pete and Jack Klugman used TV to make the world listen.

A young man in front of Congress

It was a warm June day in Washington D.C. when Adam Seligman was called upon by the members of the Congressional subcommittee on Health and the Environment to speak. Adam was only 18 and he was nervous. The prospect of speaking at such a hearing would have been daunting to most teenagers, but Adam had an additional reason to be self-conscious — he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome.

That the committee was listening to his testimony at all was down to his mother, Muriel. In the autumn of 1979 she had found herself at wits’ end. At the time, Tourette’s was a little-known disorder, afflicting just a tiny fraction of the US population. A drug called Pimozide, first discovered in 1963, could alleviate the worst of Adam’s symptoms but it wasn’t available in the US. For a while Muriel was able to bring it in from Canada, but then her shipments started getting seized by customs. In desperation she rang her Congressman, Henry Waxman, for help.