Brown-Séquard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine by Michael J. Aminoff (review)

Among the many famous physiologists of the nineteenth century, very few seem as enigmatic as Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard. Like many later twentieth-century physiologists and neurologists who made their reputations in Atlantic crossings and through the epistolary economies of science, Brown-Séquard was descended of Europeans and yet not of European origin. Where Humboldt, Darwin, or Wallace had partially established their status in Europe through grand scientific voyages elsewhere, Brown-Séquard was from somewhere else. Born April 8, 1817, in British-governed Mauritius, Brown-Séquard spent his early years immersed in a predominantly French colonial culture. He was thus a native French speaker but also a British citizen; a stranger in the Anglo-phone world yet something of a trespasser as well in, for instance, high society Paris. Perhaps Brown-Séquard’s status as scientist qua stranger in France, Britain, and the United States explains how this socialistic eccentric nevertheless found entrance into the worlds of the medical and scientific elite in Europe and North America. To his North American colleagues, students, and patients, he might have signaled the vanguard of the Paris School; to his British colleagues, students, and patients, he might have possessed an attractive worldliness befitting a man of science; and perhaps to all of those in France, Brown-Séquard signaled the vibrancy and progress of meritocracy. In any case, most scientists and physicians hailed Brown-Séquard in his lifetime for signal achievements in advancing scientific understanding of the function of the spinal cord, the involvement of the nervous system in the circulation of blood, and the function of the adrenal glands. While his claims that testicular extracts could enhance the quality of life in old age met with the wrong kind of public acclaim, obituaries and testimonials eulogizing Brown-Séquard after his death on April 1, 1894, make readily apparent that those many places that he had at one time or another called home would all lay claim to him as their own. In this peculiar way, Brown-Séquard, born to an island beyond the European world, remained very much the man from nowhere in particular.

Michael J. Aminoff’s biography, Brown-Séquard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine, is an eminently readable and serious treatment of its subject. It brings to light much of Brown-Séquard’s life through a diligent and careful exploration of his personal papers, which are now held in the archives of the Royal College of Physicians, London. Aminoff’s study, moreover, carefully explores most of Brown-Séquard’s noteworthy essays in the French, British, and American scientific and medical literature, and places them in an enlightening intellectual context. Despite these merits, there are distracting moments scattered throughout Aminoff’s volume; he overreaches in his efforts to extrapolate from Brown-Séquard’s ideas to contemporary trends in neuroscience and neurology. There can be little doubt, as Aminoff’s argues, that physiologists, biophysicists, and clinicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries subsequently advanced many of Brown-Séquard’s discoveries further, yet to understand how they did that would require a very different book focused on the intellectual history of neurology and neuroscience. Aminoff’s desire to make Brown-Séquard relevant for his audience at times therefore skirts uncomfortably near polemic, which creates some obstacles to understanding fully the context of the controversies surrounding, for example, Brown-Séquard’s infamous self-experimentation with testicular extracts in his advanced years. There is, as well, the difficulty of understanding so many social, cultural, and political landscapes as a study of Brown-Séquard’s life demands, and Aminoff—as I imagine any biographer of Brown-Séquard would—struggles with the hefty challenge represented by the unwieldy long nineteenth century in France, Britain, and America. In a way, however, such nitpicking is unfair. Aminoff...