John Hughlings Jackson is considered one of the parents of neurology, although his contributions have been widely applied in psychiatry.
Most of his life took place in the 19th century, a time when there was almost no way to study the brain, so it is surprising that he has come to such valid conclusions.
- John Hughlings Jackson is remembered.
- Mainly because his studies helped understand epilepsy.
- In fact.
- His research on temporary psychomotor crises remains valid and has not been widely developed.
“Everything we do, every thought we have, is produced by the human brain. However, the exact way it works remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries. “Neil deGrasse Tyson-
The highlight of this great pioneer was its ability to observe and analyse, carried out extremely detailed records of clinical cases and, from them, came to surprisingly accurate conclusions.
He was also a member of the Royal Society, the UK’s most prestigious scientific group.
John Hughlings Jackson was born on April 4, 1835, in York, England, the youngest of five children. In total, it was four men and one woman.
His father was a prosperous farmer who also brewed beer and his mother came from a wealthy family of tax collectors.
Jackson came into the world at a time of great change: science was in full swing, but many had not yet established the same as formal disciplines.
Medicine, for example, was seen as a domain derived from something between the hairdresser and the apothecary profession.
John Hughlings Jackson graduated at the age of 15 after attending several provincial schools and enrolled as an apprentice to a physician named William Charles Anderson.
Later, he went to The York School of Medicine and eventually received classes at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
John Hughlings Jackson established himself as a resident physician at the York dispensary. He moved to London in 1859 and the same year published his first neurology paper on facial paralysis.
He also became a medical journalist, along with his lifelong friend, Jonathan Hutchinson.
In 1860 Jackson presented a thesis to the University of St. Andrews to get a doctorate in medicine. He won the title and boosted his career.
In 1863 he became an assistant physician at the London hospital, where he directed the neurological diagnostic program.
Since then he has begun to make frequent and periodic publications, in which he emphasizes the solidity of his thesis, his methodology for the analysis of clinical conditions and his studies on Broca’s aphasia have earned him great prestige.
However, it was in 1869 that he published A Study of Seizures, a work that became a classic of medicine.
John Hughlings Jackson faked that the nervous system was divided into three levels.
The lower level included the most elementary movements and depended on the spinal cord; the average level corresponds to what it calls the motor area and is related to the cerebral cortex; the upper level involved the most complex functions and was associated with the prefrontal zone.
His research has also allowed us to understand epilepsy like never before, he did a good analysis of his symptoms, types and varieties, and managed to associate certain manifestations of this disease with mental and behavioral disorders, which was an innovation.
Jackson is also the founder of a prestigious scientific journal called Brain. Surprisingly, this initiative was born in 1878 and remains in force today. This work publishes papers on clinical neurology and experimental neurology.
John Hughlings Jackson has received great honors throughout his life. He has been president of the Uk Ophthalmology Society, the London Medical Society and the London Clinical Society; he was also appointed a member of the Royal Society in 1978.
He then became the first president of the London Neurological Society and received honorary degrees from several universities at the time. His influence on the study of the brain and nervous system was enormous.
So much so that great figures such as Charcot, Sigmund Freud, Henry Ey and psychiatrists William Osler and Joseph Lister, among others, left their work.
John Hughlings Jackson died on October 7, 1911; in his later years he suffered from deafness, but remained active for the rest of his life.