John Hughlings Jackson

John Hughlings Jackson ( born April 4, 1835 in Green Hammerton, Yorkshire (now North Yorkshire ), † October 7, 1911 in London ) was an English neurologist. Of particular importance were his research in the areas of epilepsy and aphasia.

His life

John Hughlings Jackson was born in a county of Yorkshire, where his father had a small land holdings. When he decided at the age of 17 years for the medical career, he began, as was customary, an apprenticeship under the physician Thomas Laycock in York, later professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. At age 21, he received his license and worked for three years as an assistant at the local hospital in York. In 1859 he earned his doctorate as a doctor of medicine and went to London for further training in neurology at Jonathan Hutchinson. 1863 Jackson assistant in the " National Hospital for Nervous Diseases". In this clinic won Édouard Brown - Séquard, who had just received a post as senior physician influence on Jackson. 1864 Jackson was appointed senior doctor. In this hospital he remained until reaching the normal retirement age in 1896. He was, however, appointed in recognition of his long service at the Institute for another ten years for the " Advisory doctor ". In 1864 he married Elisabeth base; she died eleven years later, apparently at a Rindenthrombophlebitis. In the course of this disease, she got a series of epileptic seizures by type, which later became known as Jacksonische seizures.

His work

Even as a young doctor spoke Jackson the view that " destructive diseases not directly cause positive symptoms, but create a negative state can arise only from the positive symptoms ". As an example, he cited the increased muscle tone and increased reflexes in the limbs with spastic paralysis. Another principle was for Jackson, that the orientation of an outbreak by which a function is disturbed, no conclusion allowed on the localization of function.

Jackson has never taken the position the function of any part of the cortex is exclusively sensory or motor mode. The sections that serve predominantly motor functions, he located in the frontal parts with predominantly sensory function in the further back parts of the hemisphere.

Epilepsy was one of the issues for the Jackson particularly interested. He dedicated his special attention to the focal or partial seizure in which all stages were good to watch. This type of propagation of seizures are now known as " Jackson attacks ". He also has the epileptic manifestations that occur as the "dream state" ( " Twilight attacks " ) or as a psychological phenomenon described in Aura, which often occur in flocks in the neighborhood of the uncinate gyrus, and suggested the name " uncinate seizures " ( uncinate fits ) in front of them.

With studies of speech disorders caused by lesions of the brain Jackson looked in 1864, but he was reluctant to express an opinion on the localization of language in the brain. Two years after Paul Broca had shown that the use of words can be lost as a result of lesions of the left frontal lobe, he refused in his first contributions on this question in 1864 to recognize a rigid localization scheme. Later, he admitted that a certain part of the brain that is supplied by the middle cerebral artery on the left side, which could be " yellow spot for the language ".

Evolution and Dissolution

Some of the most interesting studies of Jackson in his work on "Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System" included (1881 and 1890). Under Evolution Jackson understood the progress of lower, but well-differentiated stages of development to higher and less differentiated or the progress of more automatic functions to complex voluntary movements. With Dissolution he meant the reduction to a lower stage of development. Jackson assumed that the higher and differentiated the least functions suffer earliest and hardest. Here, it was based on the philosophical teachings of Herbert Spencer.

Note

Hughlings Jackson published more than 300 medical treatises. The more important contributions to the physiology and pathology of the nervous system have been edited by Dr. James Taylor in "Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson, 1931, in London.