Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Hughlings Jackson

  • Robert Bentley Todd

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Students of King’s College Hospital London are familiar with the Todd Prize in Clinical Medicine and with Todd Ward. Robert Bentley Todd’s father, Charles Hawkes Todd, was a well-known surgeon of 3 Kildare Street Dublin. His mother was Elizabeth Bentley, a relative of the poet Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself…

  • Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology. -Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit was imprecisely thought to reside in the brain’s ventricles and pineal. In the second century…

  • The migraine aura and royal astronomers

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Spleen sighs for ever on her pensive bed,Pain at her side and megrim at her head.— “Rape of the Lock”, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) About one third of migraine sufferers experience an aura1 or warning that begins suddenly, lasts about twenty to forty minutes, and most commonly affects vision, and less often,…

  • John Hughlings Jackson

    JMS PearceHull, England “. . . A man among the little band of whom are Aristotle and Newton and Darwin.”  -Gustave I. Schorstein (1863-1906), physician at the London Hospital The magnitude of Hughlings Jackson’s contributions to medicine is almost impossible to encapsulate. He was the foremost figure of nineteenth-century British neurology. He has enjoyed numerous…

  • Macdonald Critchley

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England Macdonald Critchley was a neurologist of elegance and sophistication.1 He was pre-eminently a clinical investigator of disorders of higher mental functions, especially those relating to language. He was the author of many beautifully written scientific papers, books, and delightful personal reminiscences.2 Born in Bristol in February 1900, his childhood ability was…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth century. In a golden era of…