Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/226

 BROWN-SEQUARD

BROWN-SEQUARD

The political troubles of 1S52 made him fear the consequences of his own re- publicanism and he sailed for New York where he taught French, attended obstet- ric cases at S5.00 each, and married an American woman, with whom and a baby son he returned to France the year following, only to stay one year, for he seems to have had touches of travel fever and went to Mauritius to practice. There was just then an outbreak of cholera and Brown-Sequard did fine service there.

His next journey, in 1855, was as long as the title he was asked to assume — professor of the institutes of medicine and medical jurisprudence at the Vir- ginia Medical College in Richmond, Virginia.

But the duties were uncongenial, or fortune was tossing him about until she had landed him in his fittest position. At any rate he was soon back in Paris, where he rented with Charles Robin a small laboratory in the Rue St. Jacques and taught students who afterwards did honor to their master. In 185S his lectures on the physiology and pathology of the central nervous system attracted universal attention and when next year the National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic was opened in Queen Square, London, he was chosen physician. Four years of this and special practice wore him out and he came again to America; this time as professor of phy- siology and pathology of the nervous system at Harvard. Four years later his first wife, Ellen Fletcher, a niece of Daniel Webster, died leaving him one son and he was once more in his beloved Paris where, as co-editor with Vulpian and Charcot of the "Archives de Phy- siologie Normale et Pathologique," and as professor of comparative and experi- mental pathology in the faculty of medicine he achieved a brilliant success, yet in 1872 he was again in America, settled as a New York physician and married to another American, Maria R. Carlisle of Cincinnati, who died in 1874, by whom he had one daughter.

Three years later he left for London, then on to Paris and Geneva to be in the last town professor of physiology, and marrying there his third wife, an English woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Emma Dakin, widow of T. Doherty, an artist. She died in 1894, and he only survived her three months and died of an apoplectic seizure April 1, 1S94, in his flat, 19 Rue Francois Premier, Paris.

In 1S7S, when his friend and rival Claude Bernard died, Brown-S^quard succeeded him as professor of experi- mental medicine in the College of France, but the honor he coveted most, the presidency of the Soci6t€ de Biologie, fell to him in 1887.

All his life he devoted himself to the experimental study of the most recondite parts of physiology. Money and posi- tion, a professorship in Virginia, a fashionable practice in London, and assured income in New York were reckoned as nothing when found in- compatible with his life's work. Horace Bianchon, writing of him, says, "his bronzed face, long white hair, and fever- ish alertness gave him the appearance of an old imaginative Canadian." His mind was always working and inventing and notes were jotted down haphazard on newspaper wrappers, margins of books, and old envelopes of which he had a whole cupboardful in his room.

"He was chiefly concerned with the properties and functions of the nervous system. He traced the origin of the sympathetic nerve fibers into the spinal cord and was the first to show that epi- lepsy could be produced experimentally in guinea-pigs. With Claude Bernard he shares the honor of demonstrating the existence of vasomotor nerves. From June 1SS9 he was much interested in the secretion of certain glands; his conclu- sions, not generally accepted, will probably be found to contain the germs of further advances in physiology."

His chief characteristic was entire devotion to science, the warmth of his affections, his almost superhuman activ- ity. Money, honors, positions counted as