2 '74 Brown-Sequard 



we now hear that, through the exertions of Dr. Hughes Bennett, Dr. Brown- 

 Sequard is to be secured to give a course of lectures at the northern capital, 

 whilst Dr. G. H. B. Macleod has been favourably interceding also for a course 

 at Glasgow. But the infection has likewise spread to Dublin, where the eminent 

 physiologist is afterwards to appear, in consequence of the invitation con- 

 veyed to him through Dr. Robert McDonnell. The College of Surgeons of Lon- 

 don, then, will not be allowed to have had all the harvest to itself, although, 

 to be just, we must give it credit for taking the first steps to gather it in." 



Brown-Sequard also reaped a certain harvest. Encouraged by the success of 

 his lectures, he migrated to London, and was at once appointed physician to 

 the recently established National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic. 

 Here he availed himself of the splendid opportunity to study various types 

 of nervous disease, but unlike many of his colleagues in positions of similar 

 prominence, he did not garner any golden harvest. This was doubtless due 

 not to lack of opportunity, but to lack of interest. On one occasion he was 

 asked to come from London to Liverpool to see a patient, the fee being 200 

 pounds. Brown-Sequart replied calmly that he would be in Liverpool in a 

 few days en route for New York, that the patient could see him then, and the 

 fee would be five guineas. On another occasion he was offered by a wealthy 

 American a fee of 10,000 pounds to go to Italy to treat his ailing son. Brown- 

 Sequard refused on the ground that he was not the right person to treat the 

 patient. However little pecuniary affairs interested him, he seems to have been 

 happy with his patients and his studies, and was much pleased when, in 1861, 

 he was invited to deliver the Goulstonian Lectures at the Royal College of 

 Physicians. Meanwhile, in 1858, just subsequent to his first lectures in London, 

 he became editor of the Journal de la Physiologic de I'Homme et des Animaux, 

 and continued to write for this periodical during his sojourn in London. The 

 index of this journal from the year 1856 to 1867 lists fifty articles on physio- 

 logical subjects, the majority treating of the physiology of the nervous system. 



Brown-Sequard's activity in various political movements has been cited by 

 some biographers as the cause of his frequent departures from France, with 

 his inevitable return. His life in Paris did coincide with several abrupt changes 

 in the government— the collapse of the monarchy of Louis Philippe, the estab- 

 lishment of the Second Republic, and then the foundation of the Second Em- 

 pire of Napoleon IIL Brown-Sequard, however, practiced and worked in 

 Paris on five different occasions and the dates of departure from Paris do 

 not coincide, in the main, with any political upheavals. He seems to have been 

 deeply infected with the wanderlust, possibly an inheritance from his sea- 

 faring father. In 1864, he was appointed Professor of the Physiology and 

 Pathology of the Nervous System at Harvard College, and once more emigrated 

 to the New World. 



Two years later, to quote Samuel W. Francis in an article in The Medical 

 and Surgical Reporter, August 25, 1866, describing eminent American physi- 

 cians, "Dr. Brown-Sequard, having settled in New York with the specific pur- 



