The following is a review of Cherry Lewis's The Enlightened Mr. Parkinson.
Parkinson’s disease is the second most common
neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. (xi) It is caused by damage to the
substantia nigra, a mid-brain structure that helps to control movement. (219) Its
most salient symptoms are tremors in the limbs, difficulty walking, and
difficulty speaking.
Parkinson’s disease is named for the English apothecary
and surgeon James Parkinson, the first to identify it. Born in 1755, he lived
his entire life in Hoxton, now part of East London. (3-4) As Cherry Lewis puts
it, “James Parkinson was born into the Enlightenment on Friday 11 April 1755.
He grew up alongside the Industrial Revolution and died a Romantic on Tuesday
21 December 1824.” (1) Parkinson lived during the reign of George III. The
Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars all transpired during his lifetime. (9) (In the United States,
the Seven Years’ War is known as the French and Indian War.)
Parkinson’s interest in the disease to which one day his
name would be affixed began with observations of passersby in the marketplace
of his hometown of Hoxton. The limbs of these men shook, and they had
difficulty walking. Parkinson approached these strangers and inquired as to
their health, learning that the condition established itself gradually in each
case. After identifying additional cases, he published his observations in the
1817 treatise An Essay on the Shaking
Palsy. (204-5) While Parkinson referred to the disease simply as the
shaking palsy, famed French physician Jean-Martin Charcot later dubbed the
disease Parkinson’s disease. (218)
While the precision with which Parkinson described the
disease and its progression is impressive, he did make a few erroneous claims.
The first regards sleep. Parkinson claimed that sufferers of the disease
continued to shake while asleep. In fact, during deep sleep they do not. Lewis
points out those with the disease go to bed shaking and immediately begin shaking
again upon waking. (209) They are therefore left with the mistaken impression
that they continue to shake in their sleep, and Parkinson relied on these
mistaken self-reports. The second erroneous claim that Lewis mentions regards
dementia. Parkinson believed that the mind remained intact in Parkinson’s
patients, but in fact, Parkinson’s does cause dementia in some cases. (211)
Parkinson made several contributions to medicine beyond
identifying Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson once had a young patient who was
bitten by a dog. After investigating the matter, he decided that the dog was
healthy and that therefore the boy did not need to fear rabies. However, the
boy did subsequently develop rabies. This was the first time that Parkinson
became aware that asymptomatic dogs can still spread rabies, a phenomenon not
recognized by his peers, but which he brought to their attention. (104-5)
Parkinson was a contemporary of Edward Jenner and became and enthusiastic
practitioner and proponent of vaccination. (129) Parkinson successfully pushed
for the creation of the first separate fever ward in London, and he even
authored a “benchmark” paper on lightning injuries. (194-5, 29) Parkinson’s son
John authored what may have been the first published case of acute appendicitis
in English. (190-1)
Parkinson was awarded a medal by the English Humane
Society. The award was bestowed upon him for having resuscitated a man who had
attempted suicide by hanging. (24) The Humane Society had been founded, and
resuscitation invented, in response to the alarming numbers of people prematurely
taken for dead. (25-6)
Parkinson also embraced the Enlightenment and
participated in the radical politics of his time. Hoxton was a center of
Nonconformism, which advocated religious freedom. (9) Though Parkinson remained
an Anglican, this social milieu evidently influenced his political views. He
was a leading figure of the London Corresponding Society, authoring many of
their pamphlets, some of which offered responses to Edmund Burke’s famous defense
of conservatism Reflections on the
Revolution in France. (57) At the time, only wealthy men could vote, and among
the reforms called for by Parkinson and the London Corresponding Society was an
expanded suffrage. Though this was presumably a call for universal male suffrage, Lewis describes Parkinson
as advocating “votes for all.” (60) In addition to advocating for political
reform, Parkinson advocated for better treatment of children, supporting child
labor laws long before such laws were widely adopted, and he was among the
first medical professionals to write about the abuse of children. (110-111,
114)
Parkinson’s engagement with radical politics took place
at a time of intense alarm for the English elite. The monarchy was in
tremendous debt, the American colonies had recently won their independence in a
struggle that disrupted English trade and hence employment, and the French king
had just been beheaded. In 1797, Revolutionary France attempted an invasion of
Britain, though it was easily repelled. (100) It was in this context that
Parkinson was interrogated by the Privy Council in 1794. Parkinson’s role in
the radical fervor of this period is described primarily in chapters 4, 5, and
6.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Parkinson’s life is
his contributions to the fields of geology and paleontology. He attended
lectures by the famed English surgeon John Hunter, and Hunter possessed a
substantial collection of fossils. Sometime between 1785 and 1788, Hunter permitted
Parkinson to view this collection, sparking his lifelong fascination with
fossils. (34, 134-5) Between 1804 and 1811, Parkinson published a three-volume
work on fossils entitled Organic Remains
of a Former World. (147, 181) James Hutton’s recognition that the Earth was
far older than previously believed, and that the surface of the Earth was being
continually reshaped, was propounded during Parkinson’s adulthood, and
Parkinson accepted these ideas. (135-6) It was also during Parkinson’s
adulthood that Georges Cuvier recognized that species can go extinct, something
disputed at the time. Cuvier’s emphasis on the significance of anatomy to
geology appealed to Parkinson, and Parkinson became one of Cuvier’s “…earliest
advocates.” (138-140, 182) Organic Remains
was extremely popular, and “…it was largely due to James Parkinson that
collecting fossils became the nation’s passion during the 1830s.” (185) Parkinson
was a founding member of the London Geological Society. (157)
Parkinson was a medical man of the eighteenth century. As
such, he was consigned to be a practitioner of many practices that today seem
absurd. At first mention in Lewis’s biography, these practices strike the
reader as comical. One medical fad of the times included blowing tobacco smoke
into patients’ rectums, for instance. (26) Whether Parkinson subscribed to this
particular course of treatment is not made clear, but he did in fact regard
bleeding, blistering, and colonic purging to be efficacious medical treatments.
The humor of it all gradually gives way to frustration that countless
well-meaning individuals of the intellectual caliber of a James Parkinson spent
the bulk of human history with little to recommend to their patients beyond
fresh air and a bowel movement.
The narrative unfolds mostly chronologically, though each
chapter focuses on a specific dimension of Parkinson’s life. The epilogue
describes the history of the family up to the present, and Lewis describes her
meeting with a descendant of James Parkinson.
Cherry Lewis, The
Enlightened Mr. Parkinson: The Pioneering Life of a Forgotten Surgeon and the
Mysterious Disease That Bears His Name (New York: Pegasus Book, 2017).
Comments