James Parkinson

James Parkinson’s was born on April 11, 1755 to John and Mary Parkinson. They resided at No. 1 Hoxton Square in the parish of St. Leonard’s Shoredicth, Middlesex County, England, where Parkinson lived his entire life.

He was born into the medical tradition, as his father John Parkinson was an apothecary and surgeon in Hoxton for many years.  His father had an enduring influence on him as a mentor, as James greatly valued the knowledge on anatomy that his father emphasized.

Parkinson studied at the London Hospital Medical College for six months in1776 as one of the school’s earliest medical students. He became an apprenticeship with his father which lasted 6 years before received his diploma from the Royal College of Surgeon.

James Parkinson made significant contributions to the medical literature beyond the Essay on the Shaking Palsy. These included books, monographs, and cases studies written for physicians and the lay public, some of which are worth mentioning.

He published in 1799 two editions of a medical text titled Medical Admonitions Addressed to Families Respecting the Practice of Domestic Medicine and the Prescription of Health.

In this book, James had tabulated the symptoms of diseases and the extent of risk of each illness in order for layperson to understand the distinction of one disease from another.

He became a distinguished physician and the first recipient of the honorary gold medal of the Royal College of Surgeon in1822.

James Parkinson died from stroke at the age of 69 on December 21, 1824, at No. 3 Pleasant Row, Kingsland Road, Hoxton.
James Parkinson

History of Parkinson's disease

Since before the time of Christ, physicians and other observers of the human condition have been described people with tremors, with stooped posture, and with the rapid, off-balanced walk called festination.

During the fourteenth century, an Italian physician named Franciscus de la Boe claimed that the tremor experienced when the body was moving or performing some activity.

Parkinson’s disease was first described by James Parkinson in his famous essay ‘An Essay in the Shaking Palsy’ published in 1817. In 1892, French physician, Jean Martin Charcot proposed to call this disease as Parkinson’s disease.

Based on the observations of six patients over time, whom Parkinson had never personally examined his descriptions consisting of tremor rigidity, postural abnormalities, and bradykinesia were remarkably accurate.

Sir Victor Horsley is credited with the first attempts to surgically treat a movement disorder in the late nineteenth century. He performed the first cortical ablation procedure for dyskinesia in 1890.

One of Charcot’s students, Edouard Brissaud, suggested that the material basis of Parkinson’s disease might be found in a certain small nerve center or nucleus in the brainstem, called the substantia nigra.

Finally, a student named Tretiakoff, working on his doctoral thesis in Paris, described a number of changes in the nerve cells of the substantia nigra.

Only in the 1960s, pathological and biochemical changes in the brain of patients identified, opening the way to the first effective medication for the disease.
History of Parkinson's disease