BROWN-SEQUARD, CHARLES EDOUARD and family

1787 - 1963

Admin history: Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard (1817 - 1894) was born Charles Edouard Brown on 8 April 1817, at Port Louis, Mauritius. It was his intention to pursue a profession in literature, but he was persuaded to study medicine by Charles Nodier, lexicographer. In 1846, at the age of 29, he graduated MD from Paris, with a thesis on the reflex action of the spinal cord after separation from the brain. In 1848 he became one of the four secretaries of the Societe de Biologie. The following year, during an outbreak of cholera, he was appointed auxiliary physician at the military hospital of Gros-Caillou. He was awarded a prize by the Academie des Sciences. In 1858 he established the 'Journal de la Physiologie de l'Homme et des Animaux', which he continually published until 1864. It was also in 1858 that he came to London and delivered a course of lectures on the physiology and pathology of the central nervous system, at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He then lectured in Edinburgh, Dublin and Glasgow. In 1859 he was made a fellow of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. It was due to the renown that these lectures brought him that Brown-Sequard was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1860. In 1859 he had also been appointed physician to the newly established National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, in Queen Square, London. He was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1860, and subsequently delivered both the Croonian and the Goulstonian Lectures. Brown-Sequard became famous for his spinal cord syndrome. Through his work on the localisation of the tracts in the spinal cord, he traced the origin of the sympathetic nerve-fibres into the spinal cord. He remains however unrecognised as a pioneer of endocrinology, having demonstrated through his experiments the significance of adrenal glands. In Paris he jointly founded, with his friends Edme Vulpian, physiologist, and Jean Charcot, neurologist, the 'Archives de Physiologie Normale et Pathologique'. Between 1869 and 1872 he held the chair of comparative and experimental pathology in the Ecole de Medecine, Paris. In 1872 he left Paris for New York, where he settled to work as a physician. In that same year he married his second wife, another American, Maria Carlisle. During this time he founded the 'Archive of Scientific and Practical Medicine', in which he published his first paper on inhibition. In 1875 he left New York and returned once more to Paris, after residing for a short period in London, during which time he again lectured at the Royal College of Physicians. In 1877 however he accepted an offer of chair of physiology in Geneva, having refused a similar offer from Glasgow. The following year Claude Bernard died, and Brown-Sequard was offered the vacant professorship of experimental medicine at the College de France, which he held until his own death. He suffered an attack of phlebitis in January 1894, and died in Paris on 1 April the same year. He was buried in Montparnasse cemetery. Brown-Sequard’s family owned enslaved people during his childhood in Mauritius. They had been inherited by his mother, Charlotte Sequard (1788-1842) from her father, and worked in the Brown-Sequard family home. Brown-Sequard later went on to speak publicly against slavery when he lived in America in the 1850s. Sources: 'Dictionary of National Biography', Supplement, Vol. I, Sidney Lee (ed.) (London, 1901) [DNB, 1901, pp.319-21] 'Obituary - Professor Brown-Sequard', 'The Lancet', 1894 Vol. I, pp.975-77 'Dr Brown-Sequard in Space and Time', William Gooddy, 'Proceedings of the Australian Association of Neurologists', Vol. 7, pp.1-6 'The Royal College of Physicians and its Collections: An Illustrated History', Geoffrey Davenport, Ian McDonald & Caroline Moss-Gibbons (eds.) (London, 2001) Munk's Roll Vol.IV p.124 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146006031 Accessed September 2021 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146011768 Accessed September 2021‎