David Ferrier
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Sir David Ferrier | |
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Born | 13 January 1843 |
Died | 19 March 1928 | (aged 85)
Awards | Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh (1891) |
Sir David Ferrier
Life
Ferrier was born in
Around 1860,
On returning to Scotland, Ferrier graduated in medicine in 1868 at the
At that period, the great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911) worked in the same hospital as Ferrier. Jackson was refining his concepts of the sensorimotor functions of the nervous system, derived from clinical experience. Jackson proposed that there was an anatomical and physiological substrate for the localization of brain functions, which was hierarchically organized.
Influenced by Jackson who became a close friend and mentor, Ferrier decided to embark on an experimental program. It aimed to extend the results of two German physiologists, Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907) and Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927).
In 1870, they had published results on localized
Coincidentally, Ferrier had received a proposal to direct the laboratory of experimental neurology at the Stanley Royd Hospital, a psychiatric hospital located in Yorkshire. The hospital's director was the psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne (1840–1938). Working under good material conditions and having an abundance of animals for experimentation (mainly rabbits, guinea pigs and dogs), Ferrier started his experiments in 1873, examining experimental lesions and electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex. Upon his return to London, the Royal Society sponsored the extension of his stimulation experiments to macaque monkeys, work he undertook at the Brown Institution in Lambeth. By the end of the year, he had reported his first results to local and national meetings and had published an account in the enormously influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports.
Ferrier had succeeded in demonstrating, in a spectacular manner, that the low intensity faradic stimulation of the cortex in both animal species indicated a rather precise and specific map for motor functions. The same areas, upon being lesioned, caused the loss of the functions which were elicited by stimulation. Ferrier was also able to demonstrate that the high-intensity stimulation of motor cortical areas caused repetitive movements in the neck, face and members which were highly evocative of epileptic fits seen by neurologists in human beings and animals, which probably were due to a spread of the focus of stimulation, an interpretation very much in line with Jacksonanian thought.
These – and other investigations in the same line – resulted in international fame for Ferrier and assured his permanent place as one of the greatest experimental neurologists.
In June 1876, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 33[1] and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians the following year. He was also the first physiologist to make an audacious (if scientifically incorrect) transposition of cortical maps obtained in monkeys to the human brain. This proposal soon led to practical consequences in neurology and neurosurgery.
A Scottish surgeon, Sir
Practical results of
Death
He died of
.Works
Of Ferrier's publications, two books are particularly notable. The first one, published in 1876, The Functions of the Brain, describes his experimental results and became very influential in the succeeding years, in such a way that today it is considered one of the classics of neuroscience.
In 1886, he published a new edition, considerably expanded and reviewed. The second book, which was published two years later – The Localization of Brain Disease – had as its subject the clinical applications of cortical localization.
Together with his friends Hughlings Jackson and Crichton-Browne, Ferrier was one of the founders of the journal Brain in 1878, which was dedicated to the interaction between experimental and clinical neurology and is still published today. In that year Ferrier delivered the Goulstonian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on "The localisation of cerebral diseases".
Notes
- ^ "Lists of Royal Society Fellows 1660–2007". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 24 March 2010. Retrieved 16 July 2010.
References
- Sandrone, Stefano; Zanin, Elia (2013). "David Ferrier (1843–1928)" (PDF). Journal of Neurology. 261 (6): 1247–1248. S2CID 2849337.
- Wozniak, RH: David Ferrier. The Functions of the Brain (1876). In: Classics in Psychology. Thoemmes.
- Young, R.M.: David Ferrier: Localization of Sensory Motor Psychophysiology. In: Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier
- Wozniak, R.H.: Hughlings Jackson: Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System (1881–7; Collected 1932). In: Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays, Thoemmes.
- 100 Years of Brain.
- Macewen, Sir William (1848–1924), professor of surgery, University of Glasgow
- Biography at AIM25 Archived 8 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine
- Sandrone, Stefano; Zanin, Elia (2014). "David Ferrier (1843–1928)" (PDF). Journal of Neurology. 261 (6): 1247–1248. S2CID 2849337.
External links
- Royal College of Physicians Archived 8 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine
- Ferrier's documents in the Queen Square Archive