John Hughlings Jackson

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John Hughlings Jackson, 1895

John Hughlings Jackson (born April 4, 1835 in Green Hammerton , Yorkshire , † October 7, 1911 in London ) was an English neurologist and co-founder of modern epileptology . His research in the fields of epilepsy and aphasia was of particular importance .

Life

John Hughlings Jackson was on the estate Providence Green near Knaresborough born, where his father owned a small country on the territory of modern Borough of Harrogate ( North Yorkshire had). When he decided to pursue a medical career at the age of 17, he began, as was customary at the time, an apprenticeship with the doctor Thomas Laycock (1812–1876) in York , later professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh . He received his license to practice medicine at the age of 21 and worked as an assistant at York City Hospital for three years.

In 1859 he received his doctorate in medicine and went to London for further training in neurology with Jonathan Hutchinson . In 1863 Jackson became an assistant at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases . It was in this clinic that Édouard Brown-Séquard , who had just received a post as senior physician, gained influence over Jackson. In 1864, Jackson was named senior physician. He stayed in this hospital until he reached normal retirement age in 1896. Then, however, in recognition of his long service at the institute, he was appointed "Consultant Doctor" for another ten years.

In 1864 he married Elisabeth Base; she died eleven years later, apparently of cortical thrombophlebitis . During the course of this illness, she developed a series of epileptic seizures of the type later known as Jackson's seizures.

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Even as a young doctor, Jackson expressed the view that "destructive diseases do not immediately cause positive symptoms, but rather create a negative state from which positive symptoms can arise". As an example, he cited the increased muscle tone and the increased reflexes on the limbs in spastic paralysis . Another principle for Jackson was that determining the position of a focus of illness through which a function is disturbed does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the location of the function.

Jackson never took the position that the function of any part of the cerebral cortex was exclusively sensory or exclusively motor. He localized the sections that mainly serve motor functions in the frontal parts, those with "mainly" sensitive functions in the parts of the hemisphere further back .

Epilepsy was one of the subjects Jackson was particularly interested in. He devoted his particular attention to focal or focal onset seizures, in which all stages could be easily observed. This type of spread of seizures is now known as "Jackson seizures." He has also described the epileptic manifestations that appear as the dream state ' twilight attack ' , or psychic aura , which often occur in herds in the vicinity of the uncinate gyrus , and suggested the name uncinate fits 'uncinate attacks' for them before.

With studies of language disorders caused by lesions of the brain Jackson looked in 1864, however, he was reluctant an opinion about the localization of language to speak in the brain. Two years after Paul Broca showed that word usage can be lost as a result of left frontal lobe lesions, Jackson refused to accept a rigid localization scheme in his first contributions to this question in 1864. He later admitted that a certain part of the brain, supplied by the middle cerebral artery on the left side, could be the "yellow spot for language".

Jackson founded a. a. with the psychiatrist John Charles Bucknill (1817-1897), the neurologist and psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938) and the Scottish physiologist David Ferrier in 1878 the magazine "Brain". He was u. a. Honorary member of the US National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics and 1909–11 member of the patronage committee of the journal "Epilepsia" of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE):

Evolution and dissolution

Some of Jackson's most interesting studies are contained in his papers on "The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System" (1881 and 1890). By evolution , Jackson understood the progress from lower but well-differentiated stages of development to higher and less differentiated ones or the progress from more automatic functions to complex voluntary movements. By dissolution he meant the reduction to a lower level of development. Jackson believed that the higher and least differentiated functions suffer first and hardest. Here he was guided by the philosophical teachings of Herbert Spencer .

annotation

Hughlings Jackson published more than 300 medical papers. The more important contributions to the physiology and pathology of the nervous system are made by Dr. James Taylor in Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson 1931 in London.

The Jackson syndrome (brain stem syndrome) and Jackson syndrome (cranial nerve syndrome) are named after him.

literature

  • Peter Düweke: A short history of brain research . Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-45945-5 , chapter: ... I'm just a madhouse theorist. John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) , p. 73-85 .
  • Élisabeth Roudinesco , Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Names, countries, works, terms . Springer , Heidelberg / New York 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , pp. 481–482 , keyword: Jackson, John Hughlings (French: Dictionnaire de la psychoanalyse (1997) . Translated by Christoph Eissing-Christophersen).

Web links

Commons : John Hughlings Jackson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ J. Taylor: Biographical memoir . In: J. Hughlings Jackson (Ed.): Neurological Fragments . Humphrey Milford / Oxford University, London 1925, p. 1-26 .
  2. ^ M. Critchley, EA Critchley: John Hughlings Jackson, Father of English Neurology . Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford 1998, ISBN 0-19-512339-5 .
  3. ^ WP Spratling (Ed.): Transactions of the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics. Seventh Annual Meeting, Richmond, VA, Oct. 24, 1907. Vol VFA Owen, Dansville / New York 1907, p. 215 .
  4. Uwe Henrik Peters : Dictionary of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology . 3. Edition. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-541-04963-4 , pp. 294 , keyword: Jackson, John Hughlings .
  5. Taylor J for the Guarantors of "Brain" with the Advice and Assistance of Gordon Holmes and FMR Walshe. (Ed.): Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson . Volume One: On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Convulsions . Hodder and Stoughton, London 1931.