Story Highlights
- Historical event:
- 11 April 1755
- James Parkinson was by the year of his birth (1755) a contemporary of the famous French queen Marie Antoinette, that is, he was a year older than the famous Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The British surgeon and scientist James Parkinson, after whom Parkinson’s disease is today called, was born on this day. Namely, he was the first one to systematically describe the cases of this disease in one of his works from 1817.
Of course, he did not call the disease by his own name, but “Shaking Palsy”, which corresponds to the Latin “paralysis agitans”.
James Parkinson was by the year of his birth (1755) a contemporary of the famous French queen Marie Antoinette, that is, he was a year older than the famous Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It is interesting that Parkinson was active in politics. For example, during the French Revolution, he supported its ideas.
He had a variety of other interests as well – geology and paleontology (he studied the fossil remains of extinct organisms trying to reconstruct the world’s past).
Only about 60 years after Parkinson’s time, famous French pathologist and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot named Parkinson’s disease after him.
