Ferrier lecture the localization of activity in the brain

Abstract

Sixty-eight years ago Fritsch and Hitzig (1870) published their first paper on the electrical excitability of the cerebral hemispheres. Following the doubtful indications of an experiment on man they had tried the effect of galvanic stimulation on the exposed cortex of a dog. It was the general belief that the cerebral cortex was inexcitable, but Hitzig found that a current applied to certain applied to certain areas would produce characteristic movements of the head and the limbs. Their paper marks the beginning of a new era in cerebral physiology. Until it appeared animal experiments had failed to demonstrate any localization of function in the cerebrum, and although certain nervous disorders in man suggested it, the general opinion was that the cerebrum was too highly organized to admit of any regional differences in behaviour. The new result agreed with the clinical evidence, with Broca’s asphasia and Jackson’s speculations on epilepsy, but it went very much further: it showed, in fact that the activities of the cereburm were within the reach of experimental analysis. Three years later David Ferrier (1873) developed the full possibilities of the new method of research. He was then a man of thirty working in the laboratory maintained at the West Riding Asylum by James Crichton Brown. Many of us have seen these two eminent Victorian physicians in their old age and will be glad to keep the memory of Ferrier’s slight, alert figure and Crichton Brown’s dignified vitality. It is a memory which links us to a classical period in the history of medicine, the period when neurology became a science.