Reviewed by: Brown-Séquard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine Samuel H. Greenblatt Michael J. Aminoff. Brown-Séquard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv + 356 pp. Ill. $59.95 (978-0-19-974263-9). If the later chapters of this book seem a bit disjointed, that’s consistent with the way that Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817–96) led his personal and professional lives—in multiple, separate pieces. This pattern started at his birth in Port Louis, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, which was then a British possession. His father was an American sea captain, who was lost at sea before the son was born. His mother was of French parentage, born when the island still belonged to France. These accidents of birth gave Brown-Séquard access to American, British, and French residencies, and he used all of them. He acquired his medical education in Paris during the heyday of that world center in the 1840s. At various and multiple times, he resided and practiced in Boston, London, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Port Louis, and Richmond, Virginia. In the process, he served—usually for short periods—on the faculties and/or staffs of the Collège de France, the Faculté de Médicine, the Harvard Medical School, the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Virginia Medical College. He was thrice married and widowed. Under such circumstances, it’s a wonder that Brown-Séquard got anything done, but he certainly did. In this new biography, Michael Aminoff has expanded greatly on all aspects of Brown-Séquard’s life and work, by comparison to Aminoff’s earlier Brown-Séquard: A Visionary of Science (1993). Here Aminoff has managed to follow the courses of Brown-Séquard’s voluminous physiological experiments throughout his subject’s bewildering peregrinations. His diligence in this task is [End Page 660] commendable, and likewise are Aminoff’s efforts to explain the relevant neurology and neuroscience in layman’s terms. Today Brown-Séquard is best known for his description and anatomical interpretation of the “Brown-Séquard syndrome,” that is, ipsilateral paralysis and disturbed proprioception with contralateral disturbance of pain and temperature sensation, due to unilateral hemisection of the spinal cord. Brown-Séquard also gave the correct interpretation of the function (vasoconstriction) of the vasomotor nerves, in contrast to Claude Bernard, who interpreted the results of the same experiments in light of his ideas about animal heat. On the other hand, Aminoff does not deal with Brown-Séquard’s contribution to a common, nineteenth-century theory of pathological, retrograde vasomotor reflexes in the brain. This was derived from Brown-Séquard’s work, but in truth most of those now-discarded ideas were promulgated by others. In his own time, Brown-Séquard’s reputation was framed by two events. In 1878 he succeeded Claude Bernard in the prestigious professorship of medicine at the Collège de France. In 1888 he began the self-experiments that led to the idea of rejuvenating men by injecting extracts of animal’s testicles, and later he injected other endocrine substances. Needless to say, enthusiasts and charlatans took up the cause, and eventually there was the predictably negative reaction. This latter episode occasioned Brown-Séquard’s depiction in literature by contemporary French authors, especially Emil Zola.1 Even in his eight years at the Collège de France, Brown-Séquard had no real disciples. Perhaps the most important person he influenced directly was the young Hughlings Jackson, whom he convinced to specialize in neurology. One might speculate that potential disciples are likely to be put off by a leader who is so peripatetic. Also, Aminoff thinks that Brown-Séquard may have been bipolar, since he appears to have had manic and depressive phases. So Brown-Séquard was both improbable and a genius, but did he really transform medicine? I think not, precisely because his science was so disjointed. That is, he did not articulate any identifiable set of basic principles, except the experimental method per se. Describing a phenomenon, understanding...