Illnesses of the Brain in John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams, the sixth and perhaps most scholarly American president, served courageously despite familial essential tremor, depression, and cerebrovascular disease. His cousin Samuel Adams and his father John Adams also had essential tremor, which the later called "quiveration". Alcoholism and depression affected several members of J.Q. Adams's family. Following his own time as president, J.Q. Adams returned to duty as the congressman who most assiduously fought slavery, a fight he continued even after he had suffered a major left hemispheric stroke. His fatal collapse in Congress, protesting the Mexican War, is legendary among the final illnesses of American statesmen.     

The ‘secular’ settlement and Australian political thought

This paper challenges the tendency among contemporary historians and political scientists to read secularism and religion in Australian political history in binary terms. It is argued that this framework is anachronistic, creating a barrier to a proper appreciation of religion in Australian political history. In keeping with much British Enlightenment thinking, religion through much of Australia’s history was deemed to have great social utility and its promotion was of central secular significance. This understanding framed the education debates of the second half of the nineteenth century as well as the social welfare reforms and institution building around the Federation period. Such developments cast doubt on claims that secularism of an exclusionary kind is a key element of the now widely invoked category of the Australian settlement.     

The eponymous legacy of Sir William Richard Gowers (1845–1915): A revealing letter

The eponymous legacy of Sir William Richard Gowers (1845–1915) was the subject of a comprehensive appraisal first written for this journal late last year. Since the completion of that work, a revealing February 1903 letter has come to light recording, amongst other things, Gowers’ firsthand and somewhat private opinions concerning some of his own eponymous contributions to medicine. This addendum to the primary author’s original article will review and contextualize this very interesting find as it relates to Gowers’ eponymous legacy. Gowers’ “ataxic paraplegia” (referred to as “Gowers’ disease” in the letter) and “syringal hemorrhage” are specially considered, and his broader neological contributions are also briefly addressed. For completion, a number of other previously unnoticed eponyms are added to the already impressive list of medical entities named in Gowers’ honor, and a more complete collection of eponyms found in Gowers’ Manual are tabulated for consideration.