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BROWN-SÉQUARD the island and Brown-Séquard helped in its suppression.

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 Virginia Medical College in Richmond, Virginia.

But the duties were uncongenial, or fortune was tossing him about until she had landed him in the 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 afterward did honor to their master. In 1858 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 physiology and pathology of the nervous system at Harvard (1864–1867). Four years later his first wife, Ellen Fletcher, a niece of Daniel Webster, died leaving him one son. He went once more to his beloved Paris where, as co-editor with Vulpian and Charcot of the Archives de Physiologic Normale et Pathologique, and as professor of comparative and experimental pathology in the faculty of medicine he achieved a brilliant success. 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, 1894, in his flat, 19 Rue Francois Premier, Paris.

In 1878, when his friend and rival Claude Bernard died, Brown-Séquard succeeded him as professor of experimental medicine in the College of France; the honor he coveted most, the presidency of the Société 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 position, a professorship in Virginia, a fashionable practice in London, and an assured income in New York were reckoned as nothing when found incompatible with his life's work. Horace Bianchon, writing of him, says, "his bronzed face, long white hair, and feverish 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 epilepsy could be produced experimentally in guinea-pigs. With Claude Bernard he shares the honor of demonstrating the existence of vasomotor nerves. From June, 1889, he was much interested in the secretion of certain glands; his conclusions, 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 activity. Money, honors, positions counted as nothing to him except as a means to develop science and assist young scientists. The laboratory had more interest than the consulting-room, and it was only when in need of funds to carry on experiments that he attended patients. He was forever rushing hither and thither, to the United States, to France, to England, back to Mauritius, writing, lecturing, experimenting, making warm friends everywhere, notably Agassiz, Sumner, Longfellow in the United States, often fighting for his theories against unbelief and opposition, at other times lifted high on the tide of popularity, as when for instance he helped to stamp out an epidemic of cholera in Port Louis and his compatriots presented him with a gold medal in token of their gratitude. Owing to his strong opinions he went through many upheavals that accounted for his restless and unsettled life.

His writings, of which there is no full list, are chiefly in the Journal de la Physiologie Normale de l'Homme et des Animaux; Bulletin de la Societe de Biologie; Archives de Physiologie Normal et Pathologique; Archives of Scientific and Practical Medicine and Surgery; The Philadelphia Medical Examiner, 1853, and in London and New York medical journals. In 1858 he established at his own cost the Journal de la Physiologie Normale de l'Homme et des Animaux and in 1861 was elected fellow of the Royal Society, delivered the Croonian lecture on the "Relation between Muscular Irritability, Cadaveric Rigidity and Putrefaction." The Archives of Scientific and