Hughlings Jackson Lecture. Cortical Localization and “sensori Motor Processes” at the “middle Level” in Primates

The Hughlings Jackson lectures were not inaugurated as an act of ancestor-worship, for the first of the series was given by Jackson himself in 1897 (Taylor 1932, p 422). He was 62; he was not to retire from the staff of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London, for another three years, and was to retain ten beds for six years more. The title of his lecture, 'Relations of Different Divisions of the Central Nervous System to One Another and to Parts of the Body', perfectly defines the interests of all neuroanatomists, and of many neurophysiologists, from that day to this. Jackson's ideas had been evolving continuously since he went to Queen Square in 1862, tested and disciplined all along by intensive study of his patients' disabilities. He often acknowledged his theoretical debt to Laycock, Spencer and others 'with a generosity which was perhaps more than strict justice required of him' (Holmes 1954); to Spencer, 'I should make more detailed acknowledgements were it not for the fear that I might be attributing crudities of my own to this distinguished man' (Taylor 1932, p 92). But whether derivative, or whether, as one suspects, almost wholly original, his framework of 'ideas in good order' helped him to 'discern the relevant and the significant in the welter of phenomena and processes that passed before his eyes' (Holmes 1954). His interests and original contributions ranged over the entire and, for him, unified field of neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry; from sensation and movement to behaviour, language and states of consciousness. Before experimentalists had come round to it, his clinical researches had convinced him that different activities are localized in different parts of the brain. In 1870, when Fritsch and Hitzig discovered that the cortex is electrically excitable, Jackson's ideas about the cerebral localization of movements began to interest experimental neurologists: first Ferrier, then Horsley, Schafer and Sherrington. Fritsch and Hitzig made no mention of Jackson; but it had been one of Ferrier's first objectives