John Hughlings Jackson

John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911) was a preeminent British neurologist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He began to establish that standing in the 1860s, when he incorporated the evolutionary association psychology of Herbert Spencer into his early analyses of aphasia. Jackson also benefitted from his early connection with the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. His nuanced theory of cerebral localization was derived from (1) his clinical observations of (what Charcot later called) Jacksonian epilepsy, in combination with (2) his innovation to think about neurophysiological events at the cellular level, as well as from (3) David Ferrier’s primate localization data. The result was our modern conception of the seizure focus, which was crucial to the beginnings of modern ‘brain surgery’, especially at the hands of Victor Horsley. Jackson’s influence on the neurophysiology of Charles Sherrington is widely acknowledged but poorly defined. In the larger Victorian culture, Jackson was a friend of George Henry Lewes, who was George Eliot’s companion. Lewes attributed ‘sensibility’ to everything in the nervous system, thus maintaining a monist position on the mind-body relation, whereas Jackson maintained a form of psycho-physical parallelism that was actually dualist (‘Concomitance’). Throughout his life Jackson had an interest in insanity, which he viewed from the point of view of Spencerian evolution and dissolution. The latter was an important component of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Freud took from Jackson. Late in his life Jackson defined the ‘uncinate group of fits’, which was his version of temporal lobe epilepsy.