In 1825, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard described the case of the Marquise de Dampierre. The Marquise was a young woman of fine breeding, who regularly shocked her high society friends by yelling out obscenities during conversations. Itard was, at that stage, trying to prove his theory that situations like the Marquise's could be cured through repeatedly shaming the subject into behaviour modification. He had proved his point on a couple of other test subjects that cried out or screamed and was eager to do the same with the Marquise.
Unfortunately for him, she was never entrusted to his care and he never got to cure her.
But Itard's description of the Marquise intrigued many eminent behavioural scientists of the day and, over the years, was used many times to support the behavioural theories of others.
A Monsieur Billod theorized that all people had a savage core and it was only the person's willpower which kept this savagery from surfacing. He used the Marquise as an example of what could happen when the will was damaged.
A Mr Roth argued that the Marquise's problem was physiological, a problem with the muscles in her throat.
In 1885, a 28-year-old Georges Gilles de la Tourette described his "maladie des tics", citing the Marquise as an example. He described a condition where those affected twitched and jerked uncontrollably. The sufferers also cried out, or grunted, or in the Marquise's case, swore. Most of his subjects were young males. This was probably one of the reasons his "maladie des tics" was so widely accepted. When these symptoms appeared in females, they were considered to be part of the vague condition of hysteria. However, because this malady affected males as well, it was considered a separate medical condition.
Another reason "maladie des tics" was so widely embraced was that Gilles de la Tourette was, at that time, a student of Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot was the director of l'Hospital de la Salpetriere and one of the most important and influential neurologists of his day. At the time of Gilles de la Tourette's "maladie des tics", Charcot was on a personal quest to classify groups of neurological symptoms into syndromes. "Maladie des tics" was perfect, and Charcot renamed it 'Gilles de la Tourette's illness'.
The name stuck instantly.
There has been a lot of dispute over how much Gilles de la Tourette actually discovered and how it was done.
Although Gilles de la Tourette had other case studies, The Marquise de Dampierre was the basis for his "maladie des tics". Gilles de la Tourette never met the Marquise, but the general opinion of the time was that Charcot had examined her and given Gilles de la Tourette the information he had used.
Charcot had, in fact, never met her either.
If we examine Gilles de la Tourette's claims, we see that he only ever said Charcot had SEEN her. This was true; Charcot had recognised her climbing a staircase one day as she blasphemed. The confusion was caused when another neurologist received a badly translated copy of one of Gilles de la Tourette's papers.
All of the case study details of the Marquise were taken from Itard's report. The only up to date information Gilles de la Tourette had was from her obituaries.
These obituaries revealed that the Marquise continued to swear up until her death. Gilles de la Tourette found this significant and, despite ALL his other case studies disproving the theory, he decided the condition was cumulative. It would start with small tics, and then increase in severity until peaking with swearing like the Marquise. It's not widely known that Gilles de la Tourette thought this because it is so staggeringly wrong!
Gilles de la Tourette also noticed that the illness tended to run in families. The parents or siblings of a patient with a serious case of Tourette's would tend to have a mild form of the same condition.
Comings, Comings, Devor and Cloninger (1984) and Pauls and Leckman (1986) both concluded from their studies that Tourette syndrome, Chronic Tic Disorder (CTD) and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) are closely related. Often a Tourette syndrome child with Tourette-free parents has a family history of CTD or OCD or both.
References
Howard I. Kushnir A cursing brain?: The histories of Tourette Syndrome
OMIM online