canadian neurologist c. miller fisher described the variant that bears his name in 1956. british neurologist edwin bickerstaff, based in birmingham, described the brainstem encephalitis type in 1951 with philip cloake, and made further contributions with another paper in 1957. guillain had reported on some of these features prior to their full description in 1938. further subtypes have been described since then, such as the form featuring pure ataxia and the type causing pharyngeal-cervical-brachial weakness. the axonal subtype was first described in the 1990s.