Cherry Lewis

You've all heard of Parkinson's disease, right? But what do you know about Mr. Parkinson? That's what I thought. I work in a hospital with a department specializing in Parkinson's disease, and didn't know a thing about him either. This beautifully researched book changed that. What an extraordinary man.

An apothecary (pharmacist) by training, with additional schooling in anatomy and surgery (he was a student of the brilliant anatomist John Hunter - see Wendy Moore's terrific biography "The Knife Man" for more on him), James Parkinson served as a sort of general practitioner for his neighborhood. During the years of the French Revolution, he was also a fiery political radical, a supporter of Thomas Paine, and turned out articles, screeds and op-ed pieces demanding universal suffrage (well, half-universal - women did not count, of course), tax relief, restrictions on child labor and other such seditious ideas in an England nervous about what was going on across the Channel. When several of his friends were unjustly imprisoned without trial, based on false charges laid by government-paid spies, Parkinson confronted William Pitt and other high execs and defended them. When the penalty for high treason in that era was partial hanging, then drawing-and-quartering, that took no small amount of courage. He got away with it.

He decided then that what his country needed was a guide for laypeople about health care. Concerned about the quacks and snake oil salesmen abounding in a society where various medical practitioners were loosely credentialed (if at all), he penned a 2-volume work written to help families identify fevers, diseases, and other problems, and when they could manage them themselves and when they really should call in the doctor. It was a huge seller. Parkinson was also on the board of one of the three asylums in his town, the one known for being cleaner and kinder than the other two. After one unfortunate case where he misdiagnosed a woman as mad based on the testimony of her family (who stood to benefit financially for locking her up), he wrote a detailed set of recommendations for the proper running of asylums, with precautions regarding diagnoses, decent treatment of the patients, etc.... decades ahead of the time when many of his ideas were finally adopted.

And then there were fossils. He was bitten by the "oryctology" bug (the word paleontology had not been invented yet), and amassed a huge and greatly admired collection of fossils of plants, sea creatures, and other ancient curiosities. He used his time immobilized by gout to write another serious scientific tome on his fossils - making observations and speculations that, again, were only recognized as correct many years later. And finally, he was curious about the old men he often saw, hurrying in crouched posture through the streets, limbs trembling. He stopped them, interviewed them, studied up, and then wrote the seminal description and identification of what he called "the shaking palsy," that we now call Parkinson's disease. 200 years later, we still don't know fully how to treat it. But Mr. Parkinson saw it and told the world.

Cherry Lewis's biography is a breezy, readable trip through this man's life, packed with details, adventures, trials, tribulations, and triumphs. I thank her for introducing me to Mr. Parkinson, and hope I can introduce him to you in turn.… (mere)

This remarkable man sustained a career as an apothecary from about 1775 - 1824 seeing huge numbers of poor patients but also exerted himself in a wide range of other fields.
He was part of the early radical society for parliamentary reform, the London Corresponding Society, attempting to get a more representative parliament set up. All protesters were subject to horrifying persecution by the authorities although Parkinson escaped the worst. The protests were suppressed and he moved on to other studies, doing pioneer work on fossils and becoming a successful author on that subject and on more predictable medical subjects. Later he wrote the first clear account of paralysis agitans which was later recognised to have been the definitive account and which is why later neurologists decided to name the disease after him.
The story is made more interesting by shocking descriptions of daily life at the time; the poverty, death rate, treatment of the insane and prisoners; and also by fascinating accounts of diseases and treatment, for example typhus and gout.… (mere)