6 Charcot, who later named the condition “ La Maladie de Parkinson”-an eponym that since then has held-was so impressed by the Essay that he advised students at the Salpêtrière to translate it. 5 International medical authorities also noticed Parkinson’s Essay: in 1846, the German physician, Marshall Romberg, in his Manual of the Nervous Diseases in Man the French physician, Armand Trousseau, in his 1861 Lectures in Clinical Medicine and that same year the distinguished neurologists, Jean-Martin Charcot and Edmé Vulpian. 4 The Essay was referred to in early editions of The Lancet by prestigious physicians at the height of their careers, including John Elliotson in 1830 and Marshall Hall in 1838. 2 In his Treatise on Nervous Diseases of 1820, James Cooke, physician to the London Hospital, declared “Mr Parkinson’s Treatise” to be “highly deserving” of attention, and noted that until then nosologists had “not classed paralysis agitans among the palsies.” 3 Part of the Essay entitled the “History” was quoted verbatim (without acknowledgement) in Thomas Graham’s 1827 edition of Modern Domestic Medicine, one of many popular treatises of the time designed to help people unable to pay doctors to diagnose and treat themselves. 1 In the year of its publication the London Medical and Physical Journal announced the Essay worthy of “universal perusal” and reprinted substantial excerpts from it. The Essay set out a closely observed clinical account of a progressive, disabling condition, which was swiftly recognized to be an important description that since has attained the status of a classic medical text. James Parkinson published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy in 1817, two years after the battle of Waterloo. The Essay demonstrates the potential of case construction and powerful, sympathetic case writing to transform clinical understanding of a complex medical condition of long duration. Hardly any clinical examination as we know it today undergirds what remains an exemplary account of disciplined medical witness. His detailed, diagnostic portrayal of the malady recast earlier descriptions of trembling, posture and gait disorder within a new narrative order, simultaneously recruiting reader involvement to the plight of sufferers. Parkinson incorporated medical observation with a clear focus on patient experience and subjectivity in a deeply affecting narrative, fusing clinical and urban case-descriptions within the genre of a sentimental natural history. This paper shows how the Essay radically re-formulated a diverse array of human dysmobilities as a “species” of disease.
James Parkinson’s Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) has long been considered the foundational text of the disease which now bears the author’s name.
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