Since the beginning of medical history: humans have been plagued by back and leg pain due to herniated discs. Primitive cultures attributed it to the demons doing reverence. In the late Neolithic period around 2700 B.C., the Chinese ancestors who lived and breathed in the Yellow River basin initially summarized the primitive experience of massage that had been gradually accumulated during the flood period when the ancestors fought with nature for survival, and gradually developed into an early medical model. History records that the ancient art of massage was used in clinical practice during the time of the Yellow Emperor. During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period, massage had basically become a widely used medical treatment. In the world’s first classic work of Chinese medicine, Huang Di Nei Jing, the manipulative treatment of back pain was introduced, which still has some clinical guidance significance today. In 400 B.C., ancient Greek hippocrates described the use of traction and massage to treat low back pain, using methods that involved the treating physician jumping or walking back and forth on the patient’s back. According to the Bible in Genesis 32, the ministers were the first people ever recorded to suffer from sciatica. In the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico’s capital city, there is a vertebral ceramic vase from the Monte Alban II period, 2000 B.C., which has a precise representation of the lumbar vertebrae, vertebral bodies, and articular processes. There is a gap between each vertebra representing the intervertebral discs. This is probably the earliest human description of an intervertebral disc. The symptoms of sciatica were clearly described by Aurelianus in the 15th century AD, who noted that sciatica was caused by insidious or obvious causes such as falls, violent blows, and sprains. In the 18th century AD Cotugnio suggested that this pain was caused by the sciatic nerve. However, with the gradual development of medicine, there has been a significant increase in the number of recognized diagnoses of etiologies capable of causing low back pain. In 1543 Vesalius first described the appearance of the lumbar intervertebral discs. 1742 Weitgbrecht described a tissue located between the cartilage and vertebral ligaments between the vertebrae that hold the adjacent vertebrae together. 1764 Dominico Cotunio in Italy wrote a book on sciatica, which was then called Cotunio’s disease. Herniated discs were first described by Virchow in 1857, who found ruptured and herniated discs in autopsies, attributed them to trauma, and called the herniated disc tissue “Virchow’s tumor”, but did not know its relationship to low back pain. Charcot discovered that spinal deformities were associated with sciatica. In 1909 Oppenheim and Krause performed the first successful removal of a prolapsed disc, but the disc tissue removed during these procedures was recognized by pathologists as an “endogenous chondroma of the spinal canal “. There were many reports of “endogenous chondrosarcoma of the lumbar spinal canal” in the following two decades. The famous German pathologist Schmorl was a pioneer in the study of intervertebral discs and published 11 articles on the anatomy and pathology of intervertebral discs between 1927 and 1931, and Schmorl’s node was named after him. Unfortunately, he did not have access to the “endogenous cartilage tumor” tissue taken from those lumbar spine operations, otherwise the name “disc herniation” would have been born years earlier. On June 15, 1932, a 25-year-old male patient named Kenneth Newton was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States. The patient had sprained his lower back while skiing in the spring of 1930 and experienced pain and discomfort in his lower back, radiating to the posterior aspect of his left lower extremity, which gradually subsided with bed rest. However, in January 1932, the patient suffered a recurrence of symptoms due to another injury while skiing and was admitted to Fenway Hospital in Boston, where Joseph S Barr worked, with pain and limited movement in the left lower extremity. After regular bed rest, massage and massage, and other conservative treatments, the patient’s symptoms failed to resolve significantly. Based on previous reports in the clinical literature, Joseph S Barr suspected that the patient might have an “intravertebral tumor,” and to prevent delay in treatment, Barr, then an assistant surgeon, referred the patient to William Jason Mixter, a neurosurgeon working at Massachusetts General Hospital. Mixter, 52, was recognized at the time as the most knowledgeable neurosurgeon in the spine. He agreed with Barr’s diagnosis, and on June 29, 1932, Mixter performed a laminectomy from lumbar 2 to sacral 1, which revealed an “endophytic chondroma” compressing the left nerve root of sacral 1. About a month and a half after the surgery, Barr and Mixter met by chance in the hallway of the Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital and talked about the patient, both feeling that the diagnosis of an “endochondroma” was inconsistent with the patient’s symptoms, which had appeared immediately after the injury and progressed quickly. They then compared the surgically removed “endogenous chondroma” with normal disc tissue and found that the two were structurally identical and that the so-called “endogenous chondroma” was in fact a ruptured, herniated disc annulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus. This led them to wonder if the previous diagnoses of “endogenous chondrosarcoma in the spinal canal” had all made a common mistake. To learn more, they conducted a study in two directions: First, they commissioned a pathologist to conduct a retrospective study of the pathology of more than 20 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital who had been diagnosed with “lumbar spinal canal endochondroma”. By comparing the “endochondroma” specimens removed from these patients with normal intervertebral disc tissue, the pathologists determined that these so-called “endochondroma” specimens were in fact intervertebral disc tissue. Second, they continued to collect clinical data on patients with similar back and leg pain and performed surgery on patients for whom conservative treatment had failed. These prospective studies also confirmed that it was not an “endogenous chondroma” but a ruptured, herniated disc that was causing the back and leg pain. They then hypothesized that the so-called “endogenous chondroma,” Schmorl’s node, and ruptured and herniated disc were the same thing, and they concluded that many of the patients’ symptoms and signs of low back pain and sciatica were caused by ruptured and herniated discs. However, their view caused great controversy in the following period and was resisted by some authorities. After more than a year of hard work, their view was finally accepted by the New England College of Surgeons on September 30, 1933, and their article “Ruptured Discs Involving the Spinal Canal” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 1934. Barr and Mixter introduced the concept of lumbar disc herniation as a disease, revealing for the first time the true cause of low back pain, and they made a great breakthrough in the understanding of common low back pain and lumbar disc lesions. Barr and Mixter’s scientific viewpoint ushered in the so-called “disc dynasty” of the 1930s and 1940s. Their discoveries successfully explained the problem of low back pain that had perplexed mankind for thousands of years and ushered in a new era in the understanding of disc pathology. On the basis of these understandings, medical practitioners have further explored the underlying causes of disc rupture and herniation in conjunction with basic medical research and the development of science and technology in various fields, and have continued to improve and develop treatments for lumbar disc herniation.