C. David Marsden

(Charles) David Marsden (14 April 1938 – 29 September 1998),

Marsden was born in Croydon in 1938. He trained in medicine at St Thomas' Hospital London. He was awarded intercalated Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in 1960 on the subject of pigmentation of the substantia nigra. He obtained his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) in 1963, and became a member of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) in 1965.^[2]

Career and research

He was a

Marsden's major works were in movement disorders.[3] His interest in this field started with his medical school thesis which was a comparative study of mammalian substantia nigra. After graduation his initial interest was the neurophysiological study of parkinsonian tremor. His later contributions include the complications of levodopa; the motor control physiology of dystonia, myoclonus, and essential tremor; the discovery of the mitochondrial defect in the substantia nigra in Parkinson's disease; and the use of fluorodopa positron emission tomography (PET) to study the growth of embryonic tissue transplants in Parkinson's disease. He described several neurological conditions such as painful legs/moving toes, cortical and corticospinal myoclonus, and primary writing tremor. He was instrumental in establishing dystonia as an organic disease rather than a hysterical condition, and made a major contribution to its classification.^[4] He established the UK Parkinson's Disease Society´s brain bank.

Marsden collaborated at King's College with Peter Jenner and

Marsden published more than 800 peer reviewed papers^[4][5][6][7] and over 208 book chapters.^[2] He was, for ten years, editor of the Movement Disorders Journal and the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry; he was also on the editorial boards of 21 other journals ^[2]

Awards and honours

He received several awards during his lifetime, including being elected a

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