Ferrier, David

(b. Aberdeen, Scotland, 13 January 1843; d. London, England, 19 March 1928)

neuro-physiology, neurology.

Ferrier was the second son of David Ferrier and Hannah Bell. His early education was at the Aberdeen Grammar School and later at Aberdeen University, where he was graduated M.A. in 1863. He won first-class honors in classics and philosophy and thus the Ferguson scholarship, which was open to all Scottish students of philosophy and was considered their premier award. It was at this time that he came under the influence of Alexander Bain, the famous logician and psychologist, and at his suggestion went to Heidelberg in 1864 to study psychology for a year.

In the following year Ferrier entered the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, and after receiving the M.B. degree in 1868 with all possible distinction, he served for a brief period as assistant to Thomas Laycock, professor of practical medicine at the university and the man who had influenced the young Hughlings Jackson. Ferrier supplemented his income by teaching but, finding this distasteful, he spent two years as assistant to a general practitioner, a Dr. Image of Bury St. Edmunds, and used his spare time to study comparative anatomy. The latter provided his M.D. thesis, “The Comparative Anatomy and Intimate Structure of the Corpora Quadrigemina,” for which he was awarded a gold medal in 1870.

Since he disliked general practice, in 1870 Ferrier obtained an appointment as lecturer on physiology at the medical school of the Middlesex Hospital; one year later he moved to King’s College Hospital and Medical School, where he remained for the rest of his professional life. At first he was demonstrator in physiology, but in 1872 he succeeded to the chair of forensic medicine vacated by William Augustus Guy and held it until 1889; Ferrier helped Guy to compile a popular textbook of medical jurisprudence that bore both their names. In 1874 he was elected assistant physician to the hospital and became physician in charge of outpatients and full physician in 1890. His last academic appointment was as professor of neuropathology, the chair having been specially instituted for him in 1889. Ferrier also held appointments at the West London Hospital and, from 1880 to 1907, at the National Hospital, Queen Square, where it is said that he was one of the last physicians to conduct his ward rounds wearing the traditional top hat and black tailcoat. He retired from King’s College in 1908, when he was elected emeritus professor of neuropathology and consulting physician to the hospital.

Ferrier was one of the original members of the Physiological Society, founded in 1876, and he was made an honorary member in 1927. He was also a founding editor of Brain, along with J. C. Bucknlll, J. Crichton-Browne, and Hughlings Jackson; the first number appeared in April 1878. In 1876 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and in the following year a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Ferrier received a number of medals from these societies, and he gave several of their important lectures. Many other honors were bestowed upon him, including lauréat of the Institut de France, honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham, and in 1911 a knighthood.

Ferrier was quiet and reserved and disliked controversy. He possessed an outstandingly active and agile mind, and his philosophical training stood him in good stead in his scientific work. He had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge but lacked the patience and powers of observation of some of his contemporaries in clinical neurology. It was ironic that although Ferrier was exceedingly fond of animals, he was accused, along with Gerald Yeo, of cruelty to experimental subjects. At the trial in 1882 he successfully upheld animal experimentation and won his case by proving that his colleague Yeo, who had carried out the operations on living animals, possessed a license to do so. Ferrier was a lover of classical literature, art, and the sea, and it is recorded that he “remained alert and dapper to the end.” In 1874 he married Constance Waterlow; they had a son, Claude, who became a well-known architect, and a daughter.

Ferrier’s work as a clinical neurologist was not outstanding, although he always had a large private practice. In this field he was dwarfed by such famous contemporaries as Jackson, W. R. Gowers, H. C. Bastian, and E. F. Buzzard, who were busy creating the British school of neurology at the National Hospital, Queen Square. On the other hand, Ferrier excelled all of these in experimental physiology, which he pursued together with medical practice. In this field he will always be remembered for his contributions to the problem of the localization of function in the cerebral cortex.

In the 1860’s Jackson had suggested that the cerebral cortex must represent bodily function in an orderly fashion, but he based his contentions on clinical observation and hypothesis alone. The French clinicians J. B. Bouillaud, Aubertin, and P. P. Broca had already put forward this idea, but again without experimental proof. The first experimental support came from G. T. Fritsch and E. Hitzig in 1870, and early in 1878 Ferrier discussed it with his friend and fellow student at Edinburgh, Sir James Crichton-Browne, director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield. As a result, during the spring and summer of that year Ferrier carried out investigations in the laboratory recently installed at the asylum. So began his detailed, systematic exploration of the cerebral cortex in different vertebrates, ranging from the lowest to the highest and including the ape, which was conducted over the next decade and more. He set about this work with the express purpose of confirming or refuting the theoretical suggestions made by Jackson with respect to the localized cortical areas of function. But whereas Fritsch and Hitzig had used only the dog and galvanic electric current, Ferrier employed faradic stimulation to the cortex, an important technical advance that remained universally popular until the introduction of improved methods in the 1920’s. Ferrier, moreover, studied mainly primates and his researches were more fully and methodically planned.

He mapped much of the cerebral cortex and carefully delineated the “motor-region,” as he termed it; the scheme of localized function that he put forward was based on the concept of “motor” and “sensory” regions. Like Fritsch and Hitzig, Ferrier carried out ablations of local areas of cerebral cortex as well as stimulation and observed the resulting functional deficit, Jackson’s concept of “discharging” and “destroying” lesions was therefore reproduced experimentally and his theories put to the test. As far as primates were concerned, they were shown to be correct.

Ferrier’s fame as an experimental neurologist was made by these studies, which he first published in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Reports of 1873 and later in book form as The Function of the Brain (1876). The latter, which contains the substance of his Croonian lecture of the Royal Society given in February 1874, is one of the most significant publications in the field of cortical localization. It was supplemented by a later and detailed review of his results and those of others, which he delivered as The Croonian Lectures [of the Royal College of Physicians of London] on Cerebral Localisation in the same year. Wide publicity was given to Ferrier’s findings at the International Medical Congress of 1880, in London.

Ferrier was one of the contributors to the spectacular advances made in the neurological sciences toward the end of the nineteenth century, although he was occasionally in error. For instance, he considered that the cortical visual area was in the angular gyrus rather than in the calcarine cortex; no doubt his cortical lesions had involved the nearby optic radiation. He was also guilty of unwarranted extrapolation from his findings in animals to the human brain, although he was by no means alone in the procedure. Thus, he transferred the results from his monkey experiments to a diagram of the human brain, and this was widely accepted. In the first case the interchange of data among the different species is now known to be impossible, and in the second, the belief in welldefined “centers,” to which Ferrier’s work contributed, is no longer acceptable.

The influence of Ferrier’s work was widespread, and he and Fritsch and Hitzig inspired many attempts to chart the cortex. In addition he had an important influence on the embryonic field of brain surgery, for he urged his surgical colleagues to attack cerebral lesions operatively. Throughout his life he was passionately fond of laboratory work, and in addition to his classic studies of the cerebral cortex, he also carried out investigations of the cerebellum, the limb plexuses, and further studies on the quadrigeminal bodies, thereby extending his earlier work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Ferrier published many articles on the physiology of the nervous system and on clinical neurological topics. The most important are “Experimental Researhes in Cerebral Physiology and Pathology,” in West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, 3 (1873), 30-96; The Function of the Brain (London, 1876; 1886); The Localisation of Carebral Disease (London, 1878), the Culstoniam lectures for 1878; The Crooniam Lectures on Cerebral Localisation (London, 1890); and “The Regional Diagnosis of Carebral Disease,” in A System of Medicine, C. Allbutt and H. D. Rolleston, eds., VII (London, 1911), 37-162.

II. Secondatry Literature. Obituaries are C. S. S[herringoton], “Sir David Ferrier, 1843-1928,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society, 103B (1928), viii-xvi; British Medical Journal (1928), 1, 525-526, 574-575; and Lancet (1928), 1, 627-629. Each includes a portrait. See also H. W. Lyle, King’s and Some King’s Men (London, 1935), pp. 279-281; H. R. Viets, “West Riding, 1871-1876,” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 6 (1938), 477-487; and David Mck. Rioch, in The Founders of Neurology, W. Haymaker, ed. (Springfield, III., 1953), pp. 122-125, with portrait. For Ferrier’s contribution to knowledge of the visual pathway, see S. Polyak, The Vertebrate Visual System (Chicago, 1957), pp. 147-149.

Edwin Clarke