686 THE LIFE AND WORKS OF BROWN-SEQUARD. 



His experiments 011 epilepsy, its experimental production, and hered- 

 itary transmission, had especially struck the world of medicine and 

 established the reputation of Brown as a neuropathologist. There- 

 fore when there was founded in London a national hospital for epilep- 

 tics and paralytics, Brown was appointed, in 1859, its physician, a posi- 

 tion which he held for only a few years. It was there that he finally 

 assumed the character of the chief of a school, and students hastened 

 to attend his instruction. No salary was attached to this position of 

 physician to the hospital, but there were compensations both in the 

 way of honors and of money. In 1861 Brown was elected a member 

 of the Boyal Society of London. At the same time he became, in Eng- 

 land, a consulting- physician whose advice was very much sought, and 

 was in the way to make his fortune. His reputation extended at the 

 same time in France, in England, and the United States, everywhere 

 assured because of his devotion, his activity, and his love for science. 



He indeed preferred science for herself alone rather than for any 

 profit that could be gained by her aid. His patients wearied him and 

 his restless nature prevented him from remaining for a long time in the 

 same place or in the same position. As he became more confident of 

 the value of his discoveries, he became more firmly resolved to devote 

 himself to a purely scientific career as soon as he could obtain the 

 necessary means of existence. This confidence had its base in his com- 

 plete and absolute respect for truth, in his slight regard for personal 

 considerations, and especially in his lack of pretensions to infallibility, 

 a too frequent weakness of some of the most celebrated geniuses. 



In 1863 we find him again at Boston, professor of the pathology of 

 the nervous system in Harvard University. It was his wife, a native of 

 Boston, who had persuaded him to this change. His name and teach- 

 ing had become popular in America. Happy, surrounded by friends, 

 sustained by the influence of Agassiz, who was then all powerful in the 

 American universities, Brown-Sequard seemed to have at last become 

 settled in his life and in his career. Alas ! it was then, as often hap- 

 pens in our lives, that misfortune struck him a second blow in his dear- 

 est affections and disturbed his life and his thought — his wife died in 

 1867. 



When he lost his mother, seized with a sort of irresistible impulse, he 

 quitted all and fled from Paris to Mauritius, seeking in an irreflective 

 physical agitation, if not consolation, at least distraction from the 

 domestic grief which overwhelmed him. Twenty years after, the death 

 of his wife, whom he had married in 1853, plunged him again into a 

 similarly disturbed condition. He soon quitted the place where his grief 

 had prostrated him, and in 1867 returned to France, resuming there 

 the source of a career that had been interrupted for nine years. Thus 

 his life again recommenced, like a series of equal periodic cycles, in 

 which he continually repeated his triple part of experimenter, journalist, 

 and professor. 



