John Hughlings Jackson

Neurologist, born in Green Hammerton, North Yorkshire, N England, UK. Physician at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic (1862–1906), and at the London Hospital (1874–94), he investigated unilateral epileptiform seizures, and discovered that certain regions of the brain are associated with certain movements of the limbs.

John Hughlings Jackson, FRS (March 4, 1835 - October 7, 1911), was an English neurologist;

He was the son of Samuel Jackson, a yeoman who owned and farmed his land, and the former Sarah Hughlings, the daughter of a Welsh revenue collector.

He was physician to the London Hospital and later to the then National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy located in Queen Square, London (now the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery).

Jackson was an innovative thinker and a prolific and lucid, if sometimes repetitious, writer. His papers on the latter variety of epilepsy have seldom been bettered in their descriptive clinical detail or in their analysis of the relationship of psychomotor epilepsy to various patterns of pathological automatism and other mental and behavioural disorders.

Jackson had no possibility of recourse to modern sophisticated neuro-investigative technology, but had to rely upon his own powers of clinical observation and deductive logic.

Together with his friends David Ferrier and James Crichton-Browne, two eminent neurologists of his time, Jackson was one of the founders of the important Brain journal, which was dedicated to the interaction between experimental and clinical neurology (still being published today).

In 1892, Jackson was one of the founding members of the National Society for the Employment of Epileptics (now the National Society for Epilepsy), along with Sir William Gowers and David Ferrier.

Jackson died in London on October 7, 1911.