John Hughlings Jackson, FRS (March
4, 1835 - October 7, 1911),
was an English neurologist; born at Providence Green, Green Hammerton, Yorkshire.
Biography
Bust of John Hughlings Jackson, resident in the
Institute of Neurology, London
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 October 7, 1911.
Science and research
Jackson was an innovative thinker and a prolific and lucid, if sometimes repetitious, 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.
Methodology
Jackson had no possibility of recourse to modern sophisticated neuro-investigative technology, 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 when all that is obsolete or irrelevant is discarded there remains a rich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[1].
Contributions
Together with his friends David Ferrier and 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 David Ferrier.
References
- ^ Foerster, O., "The motor cortex in man in light of Hughlings Jackson's doctrine." Brain,
June 1963, part 2, vol. 59, 135-159.
External links
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