Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson

Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson (born December 6, 1878 in Cedarville , New Jersey , † May 12, 1937 in London ) was a British neurologist .

Life

Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson

Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson's father was a native Irish clergyman and Presbyterian priest James Kinnier Wilson, who died soon after Samuel was born. The family then moved back to their home in Edinburgh . During his school years at George Watson's College in Edinburgh, he won several prizes in Greek and Latin due to his outstanding language skills . He completed his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh .

After graduating in 1902, he worked as a general practitioner at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with Sir Byrom Bramwell , where he found his ongoing interest in neurology . In 1903 he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Physiology with Honors and went to Paris to work with Pierre Marie . He then worked for a year with Joseph Babinski at the Bicêtre Hospital. After a brief visit to Leipzig , he went back to London and in 1904 went to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, initially as a general practitioner, later as a forensic doctor and pathologist , up to professional medicine. Here he spent most of his life with a group of neurologists, including Sir William Richard Gowers , John Hughlings Jackson , Henry Charlton Bastian and Sir Victor Alexander Haden Horsley .

In July 1911 he was due to a 211-page doctoral thesis on the topic degeneration lenticular Progressive: A familial nervous disease associated with cirrhosis of the liver (Progressive degeneration of the nucleus lentiformis: A family-bound nerve disease accompanied by cirrhosis ) famous and won for the gold medal of the Edinburgh University. Although Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal and Adolf von Strümpell had already described the pseudosclerosis ( Westphal-Strümpell syndrome ), Wilson showed that they had not clarified the lens-related and liver-specific aspects together, so that these were not considered to be the two main features of the disorder Could be connected.

At the time he was 33 years old and a forensic scientist at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. The following year he published an article on the same topic in Brain magazine . In it, he detailed his conclusions with the erroneous assumption that it is "mostly a matter of familial, but not of congenital or inherited causes" .

His publication flowed into the neurological term extrapyramidal and put the focus on the meaning of the basal ganglia. Because of his representations, his name was linked to the dysfunction also known as hepatolenticular degeneration (synonym: Wilson's disease ). Wilson insisted on keeping Kinnier Wilson Disease on .

Wilson's discovery earned him a chair as professor of neurology at King's College Hospital - the most important chair in the field in England  . In addition, he continued his work as a clinical doctor at Harley Street Hospital, where Charles Chaplin was one of his patients.

Works

• Progressive lenticular degeneratio. A familial nervous disease associated with cirrhosis of the liver. PhD thesis. Brain, Oxford, 1912, 34: 295-507.
• About progressive lenticular degeneration. Handbook of Neurology, 5th edition; Berlin, 1914.
• Some problems in neurology. No. 2. Pathological laughing and crying. Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, 1922, 3: 134-139.
• Modern Problems in Neurology . London, 1928.