Commémoration des connections neurologiques franco-britanniques entre 1860 et 1920

Abstract

We review interactions between British and French Neurologists from the birth of this discipline in the 1860s to the early 20th century. First connections include Robert Bentley Todd and Thomas Clifford Albutt in England and Armand Trousseau and Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne in France. During the 1860–80 years, Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris created the Salpetriere school of neurology. In London, the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic was founded in Queen's Square in 1860 with Charles Brown-Sequard as a first physician. Hughlings Jackson (1862), Russell Reynolds (1863), later William Gowers (1873) and David Ferrier (1880), all influenced French Neurology. Charcot investigated paralysis agitans and named it Parkinson's disease. He emphasized the contribution of Jackson to aphasia and epilepsy. Charcot travelled frequently to Great-Britain, especially to the annual meetings of the British Medical Association. He and other French physicians interacted with British colleagues at the International Congress in London in 1881. In the late 19th century, a number of articles were published by Charcot and other French authors in Brain, and by British neurologists in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere and Revue Neurologique. Brown-Sequard and Charcot became corresponding members of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1887, as later did Jules Dejerine, Joseph Grasset and Theodule Ribot. The creation in 1999 of the Societe de Neurologie de Paris included among the foreign corresponding members Jackson and Ferrier. Dejerine, Fulgence Raymond and Pierre Marie developed Charcot's work and received in Paris foreign neurologists, among which Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson who spent one year in Paris in 1903 with Pierre Marie. He returned to Queen Square and King's College Hospital and remained in contact with French neurology. Wilson presented in Paris in 1912 a new disease he called progressive lenticular degeneration with cirrhosis of the liver (Wilson's disease). During the early 20th century, Anglo-French connections were emphasized in international congresses, notably in 1900 in Paris and in 1913 in London, where Joseph Babinski made his lecture on the cerebellar syndrome. In 1914, the Societe de Neurologie de Paris elected 10 new foreign corresponding members from Great Britain. Since then, Anglo-French links have continued with other young promising neurologists travelling from France to the United Kingdom and vice-versa.