“Tools used by the surgeon must be adapted to the task, and where the brain is concerned, they can not be too refined.”
Lars Leksell

Since the 1800s, surgeons who operated on the brain have been devising devices to guide probes into the deeper regions of the brain. In order to introduce the probe into the brain, the early Russian surgeons made several probe guides which were based on the use of external landmarks on the surface of the skull or on landmarks on the surface of the brain.

In 1637, the French philosopher Rene Aubrey Descartes opposed the concept that it was possible to locate a point in three-dimensional space; however, the English neurosurgeon Victor Horsley, and his engineer associate, Robert Henry Clarke, using the Cartesian principle, actually built the first stereotactic instrument to introduce a probe into the cerebellum of the monkey and lesion-specific cerebellar nuclei. Subsequently used extensively by anatomists and physiologists to study the animal brain, the Horsley-Clarke rectilinear stereotactic instrument is responsible for much of our current knowledge of the function of the animal brain. Clarke predicted in 1920 in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Reports that human brain surgery could and would be performed through a small burr hole using the stereotactic frame to guide probes into the deeper brain regions. Not until twenty seven years later did Clarke's prediction come true.

Aubrey Mussen, a Canadian neurologist, built a brass stereotactic instrument in 1918 for human use. Never used, it was discovered years later in a barn wrapped in newspaper. The first successful stereotactic instrument for human use was made in 1947 by two Americans working at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia. Ernest Spiegel, the neurologist, and Henry Wycis, the neurosurgeon, made a rectilinear stereotactic instrument which they used to treat Parkinsonism, motor disorders, epilepsy, pain, and numerous other neurological diseases.

In the years that followed, stereotactic instruments were built in almost every country around the world. At the present time, stereotactic neurosurgery is being used successfully in the treatment of many neurological disorders, which heretofore were considered untreatable.