The Idea of Epilepsy as a Disease Per Se

In the 1850s Delasiauve and Russell Reynolds independently introduced the idea that the previously more inclusive concept of “epilepsy” should be restricted to that of an idiopathic disease manifesting epileptic seizures not caused by detectable brain pathology. This idea was rather widely accepted, though with some modification, over much of the next century. However there was increasing opposition to the idea from those, including John Hughlings Jackson, who perceived that all epileptic seizures must be symptoms of underlying brain disease. With increasing identification of structural brain pathology in what had been regarded as instances of idiopathic epilepsy, the latter view has increasingly prevailed.     

Biological and Epistemological Models of Localization in the Nineteenth Century: From Gall to Charcot

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the localizationist doctrines became closely associated with the memory trace paradigm. The analysis of the texts dealing with the localization and the nature of ‘the loss of articulated speech’ (motor aphasia) by Bouillaud, Lordat, Dax, Broca, Trousseau, Baillarger, Charcot and Wernicke shows how the biological paradigm of localization presented by Gall and based on the notion of organ-function correspondence was transformed into a model based on localizable memory traces. This change resulted in the theoretical unification of the mechanisms of motor and non-motor forms of aphasia. These forms, which the earlier authors tended to separate in their analyses of the underlying mechanisms, were now regarded as involving similar mechanisms related to the loss of mnestic images. The crucial step in this development was taken by Broca who presented the hypothesis that the faculty of coordination of speech movements, which according to his predecessors was the faculty lost in motor aphasia, was actually an intellectual faculty and a specific form of memory, and motor aphasia consequently a selective kind of amnesia. Theorists like Charcot and Wernicke generalized this idea into a comprehensive theory of the nature of localization based on the notion of memory traces. Thus, the localization of function was reduced to the localization of representations. Instead of biological paradigms, this model of localization is rooted in the epistemological tradition of psychology represented by Locke and Condillac, who were primarily interested in the problem of representation. In physiology, this approach usually resulted in attempts at localizing representations instead of functions.     

Cortical epileptogenesis and David Ferrier

There was an increasing medical interest in the localization of representation of function in the cerebral cortex after Broca in 1861 identified a cortical area that appeared responsible for expressive speech. By the late 1860s, John Hughlings Jackson—based on clinico-pathological correlations mainly in persons with focal motor seizures—had reasoned that contralateral somatic motor function was represented in another area of the cortex. This localization was supported by Fritsch and Hitzig (1870) in experimental cortical stimulation studies in dogs. These authors also reported producing events resembling contralateral motor convulsing in their animals. Their work, and Jackson’s ideas, prompted David Ferrier, in Great Britain, to begin a program of cerebral cortical stimulation studies in various vertebrate species, trying to locate cortical sites of representation of functions other than expressive speech and motor activity. In his initial report of his investigations (1873), he noted that appropriately sited Faradic stimulation evoked immediate or delayed contralateral focal motor seizures, some of which evolved into generalized convulsions. On this basis he reasoned that focal motor and generalized seizures were expressions of the same disorder; that nearly all epilepsies originated in the cerebral cortex and not in the lower brain stem, as hitherto thought; and that the clinical pattern of epileptic seizure phenomenology depended on the function of the cortical site of origin and the extent and direction of spread of seizure activity in the brain. He not only provided experimental verification for Jackson’s reasoning about epileptic seizure mechanisms but expressed the ideas a good deal more clearly than Jackson ever managed to do. Ferrier’s achievement in this regard has tended to escape notice, lost sight of because of the great importance of his investigations into localization of cerebral function.     

Compassionate Protector of America: The Symbolism of Old Hickory in a Jackson Woman's Mind

Serving as America's only female newspaper editor during the election of 1832, Anne Royall became possibly the first public “Jackson Woman” by supporting the chief executive's bid for re-election in her sheet titled Paul Pry. A closer look at Royall's recollections from her travels in Alabama from 1818 to 1822 shows her to be a blooming “Jackson Woman” developing before the Jackson party was even conceived. In 1828, Royall's Black Books produced a scathing indictment of American society. Both the Adams and Jackson campaigns actively recruited her for their mud-slinging contest but she declined. Three years later Royall started printing Paul Pry. The Black Books and Paul Pry gave Royall a public voice, and she was not afraid to use it. Between 1818 and 1832, Anne Royall went from being a Jackson admirer to being a public Jackson woman.     

“British Tribute to Virginia Valor”: Unveiling the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue

This article outlines the political agendas surrounding the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue, an early Confederate monument commissioned in Britain in 1863 and unveiled with much fanfare in Richmond, Virginia in 1875. It argues that the statue’s British provenance made it an ideal means of expressing the distinctive claims of the Conservative Party of Virginia. By commemorating both General Jackson and Britain’s Confederate sympathizers, modernizers in the Conservative Party presented themselves as representatives of an Anglo‐Saxon Christian value system, guardians of the “Old Dominion’s” immemorial character, and defenders of political views that held national and international significance. Thus the Conservatives dedicated an international monument to a transatlantic and implicitly racist cultural tradition as part of their larger effort to facilitate Virginia’s integration into the reconstructed national union on terms favorable to the former Confederates.     

The Third Man: Robert Dunn’s (1799–1877) Contribution to Aphasia Research in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England

Throughout his medical career, Robert Dunn (1799–1877) published a number of clinical cases with postmortem reports involving acquired language disorders, with the first noted in 1842. He developed a physiologically informed approach to psychological function during the 1850s along with a group of notable colleagues Benjamin Collins Brodie, Henry Holland, Thomas Laycock, John Daniel Morell, and Daniel Noble. He was also active in ethnographic research on human origins and racial diversity. As such, Dunn represents an interesting player in the developing fields of neurology, psychology, and anthropology in England in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These various strands converged at the meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in 1868, where Dunn shared the program of lectures on the cutting-edge topic of aphasia with Paul Broca (1824–1880) and John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911). Dunn’s ideas developed over a longer time frame than his younger colleagues and as such represent a unique blending of concepts from the earlier work of Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828) and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1798–1881) to the perspectives on language organization in the brain developed after 1861.     

'Not Enough Food and Too Many Military Police’: Discipline,Food, and the 23rd Reserve Battalion July – September 1917

This paper seeks to explain the underlying causes of a mutiny that the Canadian artist A.Y. Jackson took part in while stationed in the English village of Shoreham-by-Sea and serving with the 23rd Reserve Battalion. The battalion was filled with convalescents who, having been wounded at the front, were on their way back to France after a stay in ‘blighty.’ The men of the battalion lived in a world of harsh discipline, rigorous physical training and poor-quality rations. Moreover, those who commanded them tended to be ‘shirkers’ –– at least in the eyes of the men of the battalion –– who had avoided going to France, choosing instead to remain in England. A sense of the unfairness of it all pervades the reminiscences of Jackson and other members of the battalion. Officially, the ‘mutiny’ never took place, and the whole incident was swept under the rug after a few high ranking Generals and dignitaries were called in to tour the mess facilities.