Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard
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| Born | 8 April 1817 Port Louis, Mauritius
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| Died | 2 April 1894 (aged 76) Sceaux, France
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| Known for | Brown-Séquard syndrome |
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| Institutions | Virginia Commonwealth University |
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard FRS (8 April 1817 – 2 April 1894) was a Mauritian physiologist and neurologist who, in 1850, became the first to describe what is now called Brown-Séquard syndrome.
Contents
Early life
Brown-Séquard was born at Port Louis, Mauritius, to an American father and a French mother. He attended the Royal College in Mauritius, and graduated in medicine at Paris in 1846. He then returned to Mauritius with the intention of practising there, but in 1852 he went to the United States. There he was appointed to the faculty of the Medical College of Virginia where he conducted experiments in the basement of the Egyptian Building.
He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1854.
Later life
He returned to Paris, and in 1859 he migrated to London, becoming physician to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic. There he stayed for about five years, expounding his views on the pathology of the nervous system in numerous lectures which attracted considerable attention. In 1864 he again crossed the Atlantic, and was appointed professor of physiology and neuropathology at Harvard. He relinquished this position in 1867, and in 1869 became professor at the École de Médecine in Paris, but in 1873 he again returned to America and began to practice in New York City. While in New York, his daughter, Charlotte Maria was born.
Finally, he went back to Paris to succeed Claude Bernard in 1878 as professor of experimental medicine in the Collège de France, and he remained there until his death, which occurred in 1894 at Sceaux, France. He was buried in Paris at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
In 1886 Brown-Séquard was elected to the Board of the Sugar Club. He also was a member of the Royal Society of London.
Works
Brown-Séquard was a keen observer and experimentalist. He contributed largely to our knowledge of the blood and animal heat, as well as many facts of the highest importance on the nervous system. He was the first scientist to work out the physiology of the spinal cord, demonstrating that the decussation of the fibres carrying pain and temperature sensation occurs in the cord itself. His name was immortalised in the history of medicine with the description of a syndrome which bears his name (Brown-Séquard syndrome) due to the hemisection of the spinal cord, which he described after observing accidental injury of the spinal cord in farmers cutting sugar cane in Mauritius.
Far more important is that he was one of the first to postulate the existence of substances, now known as hormones, secreted into the bloodstream to affect distant organs.
Brown-Séquard's research, published in about 500 essays and papers, especially in the Archives de Physiologie, which he helped to found in 1868 along with Jean-Martin Charcot and Alfred Vulpian, cover a very wide range of physiological and pathological subjects.
See also
- Brown-Séquard syndrome
- Hormone therapy
