Todd, Hughlings Jackson, and the electrical basis of epilepsy.
John Hughlings Jackson is widely credited with the first electrical theory of epilepsy (1873), which was confirmed by the experimental studies of Hitzig and Ferrier. His views are summarised in his famous Lumleian lectures to the Royal College of Physicians in 1890. Robert Bentley Todd, however, had earlier developed an electrical theory of epilepsy, which he presented in his own brilliant Lumleian lectures to the Royal College of Physicians in 1849. Todd was influenced by the electrical discoveries of his contemporary, Michael Faraday, and thought of the brain as having battery like properties that led to the sudden discharge of electrical energy (nervous force) in epilepsy. Unlike Hughlings Jackson, Todd was an anatomist and physiologist as well as a physician, and he did his own electrical experiments in rabbits to prove his theory, something Hughlings Jackson, who relied on Ferrier for scientific and experimental support, could never have done. There is no mention of Todd's Lumleian lectures in Hughlings Jackson's later lectures and writings, nor in those of Hitzig or Ferrier. Todd's remarkable observations and lectures, and his electrical theory of epilepsy deserve to be drawn to the attention of the medical and scientific community.
Reynolds
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Institute of Epileptology, Weston Education Centre, King's College, Denmark Hill Campus, SE5 9PJ, London, UK. reynolds@buckles.u-net.com
D000818:Animals; D004594:Electrophysiology / Q000266:history; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000266:history* / Q000503:physiopathology; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D006113:United Kingdom