"In 1926, French neurologists Charles Foix (1882-1927) and Théophile A J Alajouanine (1890-1980) described two patients with subacute necrotic myelitis 1. Clinically, they presented with slowly ascending, increasingly flaccid paraparesis. Pathologically, they had an endomesovasculitis with vascular wall thickening but no thrombosis. It was not until later that the aetiology was proposed to be a dural arteriovenous fistula, an entity that was not known at the time of the original publication. In the ensuing decades, some authors have incorrectly attributed the syndrome to venous thrombosis 2,3."