Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard: professor of physiology and pathology of the nervous system at Harvard Medical School.

Abstract

Brown-Séquard's career as Harvard's first professor of the physiology and pathology of the nervous system is chronicled in a unique and previously unpublished series of his private letters and university archival material. At Harvard, Brown-Séquard tried to modernize the curriculum by adding laboratory exercises and animal experiments in the teaching of physiology. He dreamed of constructing a great physiologic institute to study fundamental problems in neurology, including epilepsy, paralysis, muscular atrophy, nerve injuries, and a wide variety of other problems. His letters reveal Brown-Séquard as a disarmingly "modern" professor who avoided faculty meetings, complained constantly about lecture schedules, his salary, and the improper care of his animals--and threatened to resign regularly!