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John Hughlings Jackson

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Hughlings Jackson

(born April 4, 1835, Green Hammerton, Yorkshire, Eng. — died Oct. 7, 1911, London) British neurologist. He showed that most right-handed persons with aphasia had disease on the left side of the brain, confirming Paul Broca's findings. In 1863 he discovered Jacksonian epilepsy (spasms progressing through the body), tracing it to motor region damage. Electroencephalography has confirmed his 1873 definition of epilepsy as "a sudden, excessive, and rapid discharge" of electricity by brain cells.

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Scientist: John Hughlings Jackson
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British neurologist (1835–1911)

Jackson was born at Green Hammerton in England and educated at York Hospital and St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. He received his MD from St. Andrews University in 1860. He served on the staff of the London Hospital as assistant physician (1863) and physician (1874–94) and in 1862 began his long association with the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, London. Here he specialized in neurology and ultimately exercised a profound influence on the development of clinical neurology. Through his work with epileptics, he described the condition, now called Jacksonian seizure or Jacksonian epilepsy, in which part of the leg, arm, or face undergoes spasmodic contraction due to local disease of the cerebral cortex in the brain.

Jackson's work supported the findings of Paul Broca and others – that different bodily functions are controlled by different regions of the cerebral cortex. Jackson also described a local paralysis of the tongue and throat caused by disease of the corresponding cranial nerves. This is now known as Jackson's syndrome.


(c.1602–63)

English master-mason active in Oxford. He oversaw the building of Canterbury Quadrangle, St John's College (from 1634). The unusual south porch at the Church of St Mary the Virgin (1637), with Solomonic columns and other Baroque effects curiously co-existing with the Perpendicular Gothic fan-vaulting of the ceiling, is a tour-de-force, and is known to have been built by him, although the name of Nicholas Stone has also been associated with the design. He was consulted about the tower and gateway of University College (1635–6), and superintended the building of the new Chapel and Library of Brasenose College (1656–66), where late-Gothic and Renaissance elements are again mixed with great élan. He may have designed Welford Park, Berks. (c.1660—later remodelled).

Bibliography

  • Colvin (1995)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

World of the Mind: John Hughlings Jackson
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(1835–1911). Widely known as the 'father' of British neurology. He was born in Yorkshire and spent the greatest part of his life in London, where he was for many years consultant physician to the then newly founded National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square. His conception of nervous and mental disease, which owed much to the writings of Herbert Spencer, was formulated in terms of the evolution and dissolution of the nervous system and is perhaps the most thoroughgoing attempt to explain the breakdown of neurological functions along evolutionary lines.

Jackson's most important contributions were to the study of epilepsy and aphasia. As regards the former, he was the first to appreciate that the sequence of involuntary movements which characterizes focal epilepsy indicates the spatial layout of excitable foci in the motor cortex. This brilliant inference was confirmed soon after by the experiments of David Ferrier and others, who demonstrated in animals that electrical stimulation of individual cortical foci elicits discrete bodily movements. Jackson was also the first to describe perceptual illusions and other dreamlike states of consciousness evoked by focal epileptic discharges in the temporal lobes. These have since been fully studied by Wilder Penfield.

In his work on aphasia, Jackson laid great stress on the fact that the disorder is an affection of language rather than merely one of speech. In his view, aphasia is essentially an intellectual deficit marked by inability to formulate propositions, rather than by failure to recall individual words. He further pointed out that words or phrases may on occasion be uttered under stress of emotion when they cannot be spoken voluntarily. (See also language: neuropsychology.)

Although in agreement with Paul Broca that aphasia almost invariably results from damage to the left cerebral hemisphere, Jackson suggested that visual and spatial disabilities might bear a comparable relation to the right cerebral hemisphere. Though long ignored, this idea of cerebral asymmetry of function has been widely accepted in contemporary neuropsychology.

Jackson's Selected Papers (2 vols., ed. J. Taylor, 1931) is an indispensable source of his writings. His papers on aphasia were republished by Sir Henry Head in Brain, 38 (1915).

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

    Bibliography
  • Critchley, M., and Critchley, E. A. (1998). John Hughlings Jackson: Father of English Neurology.


Wikipedia: John Hughlings Jackson
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John Hughlings Jackson

Bust of John Hughlings Jackson, resident in the Institute of Neurology, London
Born 4 March 1835
Providence Green, Green Hammerton, Yorkshire
Died 7 October 1911
London
Nationality English
Fields neurology

John Hughlings Jackson, FRS (4 March 1835 - 7 October 1911), was an English neurologist; born at Providence Green, Green Hammerton, near Harrogate, Yorkshire.

Contents

Biography

He was the son of Samuel Jackson, a yeoman who owned and farmed his land, and the former Sarah Hughlings, the daughter of a Welsh revenue collector. His mother died just over a year after giving birth to him. He had three brothers and a sister; his brothers emigrated to New Zealand and his sister married a physician.

He was physician to the London Hospital and later to the then National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy located in Queen Square, London (now the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1878.

Jackson died in London on 7 October 1911.

Science and research

Jackson was an innovative thinker and a prolific and lucid, if sometimes repetitive, writer. Though his range of interests was wide, he is best remembered for his seminal contributions to the diagnosis and understanding of epilepsy in all its forms and complexities. His name is attached eponymously to the characteristic "march" of symptoms in focal motor seizures and to the so-called "dreamy state" of psychomotor seizures of temporal lobe origin. His papers on the latter variety of epilepsy have seldom been bettered in their descriptive clinical detail or in their analysis of the relationship of psychomotor epilepsy to various patterns of pathological automatism and other mental and behavioural disorders.

In his youth Jackson had been interested in conceptual issues and it is believed that in 1859 he contemplated the idea of abandoning medicine for philosophy.[1] Thus, an important part of his work concerned the evolutionary organization of the nervous system for which he proposed three levels: a lower, a middle, and a higher. At the lowest level, movements were to be represented in their least complex form; such centres lie in the medulla and spinal cord. The middle level consists of the so-called motor area of the cortex, and the highest motor levels are found in the prefrontal area.

The higher centres inhibited the lower ones and hence lesions thereat caused ‘negative’ symptoms (due to an absence of function). ‘Positive’ symptoms were caused by the functional release of the lower centres. This process Jackson called ‘dissolution’, a term he borrowed from Herbert Spencer. [2] The ‘positive-negative’ distinction he took from Sir John Reynolds.[3]

Continental psychiatrists and psychologists (e.g. Ribot, Janet, Freud, Ey) have been more influenced by Jackson’s theoretical ideas than their British counterparts. [4] During the 1980s, the ‘positive-negative’ distinction was temporarily fashionable in relation to the symptoms of schizophrenia. [5]


Methodology

Jackson could not use modern sophisticated neuro-investigative technology (it had not been invented), but had to rely upon his own powers of clinical observation and deductive logic. Some of his eminent successors in the field of British neurology have been critical of many of his theories and concepts; but as Sir Francis Walshe remarked of his work in 1943, " ... when all that is obsolete or irrelevant is discarded there remains a rich treasure of physiological insight we cannot afford to ignore."

In Otfrid Foerster's research on the motor cortex, he cites exclusively Hughlings Jackson for the initial discovery (although without evidence) of the brain as the spring of neurological motor signaling[6].

Contributions

Together with his friends Sir David Ferrier and Sir James Crichton-Browne, two eminent neurologists of his time, Jackson was one of the founders of the important Brain journal, which was dedicated to the interaction between experimental and clinical neurology (still being published today). Its inaugural issue came to light in 1878.

In 1892, Jackson was one of the founding members of the National Society for the Employment of Epileptics (now the National Society for Epilepsy), along with Sir William Gowers and Sir David Ferrier.

Oliver Sacks has repeatedly cited Jackson as an inspiration in his neurologic work.

References

  1. ^ James Taylor, ‘Jackson, John Hughlings (1835–1911)’, rev. Walton of Detchant, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
  2. ^ Berrios G E (2001) Jackson and his “The Factors of Insanities”. History of Psychiatry 12: 353-373
  3. ^ Berrios G E (1985) Positive and Negative Symptoms and Jackson: A Conceptual History. Archives General Psychiatry 42: 95-97
  4. ^ Berrios G E (1977) Henri Ey, Jackson et les idées obsédantes. L'Evolution Psychiatrique 42: 685-699
  5. ^ Berrios G E (1992) Positive and negative signals. A conceptual history. In Marneros A et al (eds) Negative versus positive schizophrenia. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 8-27
  6. ^ Foerster, O., "The motor cortex in man in light of Hughlings Jackson's doctrine." Brain, June 1963, part 2, vol. 59, 135-159.

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