Rochoux had equated ‘apoplexy’ with intracerebral haemorrhage, but he also reported a few rare and unexplained cases of softening, ‘simulating apoplexy’. Others tentatively proposed ‘essential softening’ as a separate disease. Rostan in 1820 made this a postulate, but since his starting point was softening of brain tissue, he included patients in whom the state of ‘apoplexy’ represented not the onset, but an aggravation of pre-existing illness. He interpreted non-focal premonitory symptoms as the initial stage of the disease; this was followed by a phase of focal deficits. Rostan explicitly opposed the idea that softening was an inflammatory condition, a hypothesis to which Lallemand and others adhered, following Broussais’ popular ‘irritation theory’. Fuchs, insisting on paralysis as the essential feature, excluded inflammation as the cause of any form of ‘encephalomalacia’.