The Ferrier Lecture, 1968 - Motor apparatus of the baboon’s hand

It is exactly 40 years since Ferrier died, and 39 years since Sherrington gave the first Ferrier Lecture in honour of his work. Sherrington (1906) had dedicated The integrative action of the nervous system to Ferrier ‘in token of recognition of his many services to the experimental physiology of the central nervous system’. At Aberdeen Ferrier had been taught by Bain, the Professor of Logic, who kept a model of the human brain upon his lecture table. Ferrier moved to London in 1870, and was excited by Hughlings Jackson’s revolutionary discoveries and ideas about the nature and localization of the sensory and motor functions of the human brain. Early in 1873 he discussed Fritsch & Hitzig’s (1870) pioneer galvanic stimulations of the dog’s cortex with his friend James Crichton-Browne. In the spring and summer of that year he performed his pioneer faradic stimulations of the brains of monkeys in the laboratory of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, of which Crichton-Browne was Medical Director (Sherrington 1928). He sought to ‘put to experimental proof the views entertained by Dr Hughlings Jackson on the pathology of Epilepsy, Chorea and Hemiplegia, by imitating artificially the "destroying" and “discharging lesions” of disease which his writings have defined and differentiated’ (Ferrier 1873). 'The phenomena of localized and unilateral convulsive movements, depending, as Hughlings Jackson shows, on vital irritation of certain regions of the cortex, are essentially of the same nature as those caused by electrisation of the same regions’ (1876, p. 133). But Ferrier believed that many of the movements he mapped by electrical stimulation had evidently a purposive or volitional character’ (1876, p. 163). In 1876 he transferred his monkey map to the brain of man, and described of the relation between brain fissures and bony landmarks; and in 1883 he suggested that the time had come when localized cerebral lesions should be excised by the surgeon. For this, as he later recalled with amusement, he was criticized in an editorial in the Lancet (Ferrier, 1888), but in 1884 Godlee removed a localized tumour ‘of the size of a walnut’ (Sherrington 1928) from the Rolandic cortex through an opening exactly overlying it and but little larger than itself. Ferrier and Hughlings Jackson both witnessed this memorable operation (Trotter 1934). As time went on, experimentalists interested themselves more in defining details of localization than in developing concepts of function (Phillips 1966). ‘More penetrative modes and aims of analysis came to be little pursued,’ wrote Sherrington (1928). ‘A localization vogue reigned for nearly a quarter of a century, and became in due course tedious and relatively infertile.’