Editorial

With this issue Brain embarks upon its 142nd year at the forefront of neurological advances. In Brain's first year, 1878, Benjamin Disraeli was half-way through his second premiership, and Great Britain came close to war with Russia. Henry Tate and sons started making sugar cubes in Silvertown on the bank of the Thames, and Augustus John, whose paintings would eventually hang in the Tate Gallery, was born in Pembrokeshire. Arthur Conan Doyle spent 1878 at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary as the outpatient clerk to Dr Joseph Bell, widely suspected to have been the model for Sherlock Holmes. Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, later known as Joseph Conrad, came to England, and the University of London started awarding full degrees to female graduates. Further afield, Cesare Lombroso published L'uomo delinquente, which set out his theory of criminal atavism, and Eadweard Muybridge proved that all four of a galloping horse's hooves can simultaneously be off the ground. The year 1878 also saw the births of Joseph Stalin and of George Whipple, who went on to describe the intestinal lipodystrophy that goes by his name. Among notable people who died in 1878 were Claude Bernard, who, while researching the milieu intérieur, was abandoned by his family when they found that the family dog had been vivisected on the kitchen table; Carl von Rokitansky, among whose contributions to medicine the description of spondylolisthesis probably made the biggest impact on neurology; and William Stokes, famous for both Stokes-Adams syndrome and Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Most importantly, 1878 saw John Hughlings Jackson, John Charles Bucknill, James Crichton-Browne and David Ferrier establish Brain as a forum for articles directly relevant to the principles and practice of neurology. The first issue featured articles by William Gowers (On some Symptoms of Organic Brain Disease), William Hutchinson (Notes on the Symptom-Significance of Different States of the Pupil) and Henri Duret (On the Rôle of the Dura Mater and its Nerves in Cerebral Traumatism), which any modern neurologist would acknowledge as belonging in the direct line of evolution of knowledge that influences current practice. It also contained a lengthy article by Clifford Allbutt, inventor of the modern clinical thermometer, on 'Brain Forcing', which modern readers might recognize as mental strain, and by Crochley Clapham on 'Skull Mapping', verging on phrenology and drawing extensively on autopsies of the inmates of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, which Crichton-Browne had turned into a centre for research into the malfunction of the brain.

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