A clinical lecture on shaking palsy. By Thomas Buzzard, MD, FRCP. (Physician to the National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic). Brain 1882; 4: 473-492 and On-off fluctuations in Parkinson's disease. A clinical and neuropharmacological study. By RJ Hardie, AJ Lees and GM Stern. (From the Department of Neurology, University College Hospital, London WC1). Brain 1984; 107: 487-506.

Abstract

Thomas Buzzard (1831–1919) never attended medical school but was one of the last doctors to enter medicine through apprenticeship to a general practitioner. Appointed to the staff of the National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic in 1867, at the suggestion of Hughlings Jackson, Buzzard was one of that small group of physicians who helped ‘Queen Square’ acquire its international reputation (Fig. 1). He doubled-up as a medical journalist; dealt with the Soho (London) outbreak of cholera in 1854; and served with the Turkish army in the Crimean War. He resigned his hospital appointment in 1906. Sir Gordon Holmes did not consider that Thomas Buzzard contributed much to the advance of neurology but acknowledged that he was a sound and practical physician who taught well. Buzzard wrote on The simulation of hysteria by organic disease (1891), delivered the Harveian Lectures for 1885 on Some forms of paralysis from peripheral neuritis (1886) and published on Clinical aspects of syphilitic nervous affections (1874). In 1882, Buzzard published a series of 25 lectures, mostly delivered at the National Hospital, as Clinical lectures on disease of the nervous system . The one on paralysis agitans is also the first article in Brain on Parkinson's disease (printed without mutual attribution having a few sentences omitted or inserted but otherwise unchanged). Fig. 1 The honorary medical staff of the national hospital, Queen Square, 1897. Thomas Buzzard is standing at the back right. From Holmes, G., The National Hospital Queen Square, 1860–1948 (1954). Edinburgh and London: E. & S. Livingstone. Plate III facing page 41. So graphic and admirable is James Parkinson's original description that little remains for subsequent observers to add: ‘involuntary tremulous motion, with lessened muscular power, in parts not in action and even when supported; with a propensity to bend the trunk forwards and to pass …