 Between 1908 and 1912 Harvey Cushing performed three dorsal rhizotomies to improve his patients’ quality of life.The 1913 use in Germany of the rhizotomy procedure by Otfrid Foerster, often wrongly credited as the father of rhizotomy, was therefore actually not the first such use, since Sherrington’s studies were used as a basis for performing posterior root rhizotomy for the relief of spasticity in the lower limb muscles.Rhizotomy for spasticity purposes did indeed then proceed to take about a fifty-year hiatus for reasons as yet not thoroughly distilled from the clinical records and reports on the phenomenon.