Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Brown-Sequard, Edward
BROWN-SEQUARD, Edward, a physician and physiologist, born in the island of Mauritius, 1818. He was educated in his native island, and in 1838 went to Paris to complete his medical studies. In 1840 he received the degree of M.D. from the faculty of the Academy of Medicine. He has devoted his time since his graduation almost exclusively to an extended series of experimental investigations on important physiological topics, such as the condition and functions of the different constituents of the blood, animal heat, the spinal column and its relations to diseases of the subject, the muscular system, the sympathetic nerves and ganglions, and the effect of the removal of the supra-renal capsules. He has visited England and the United States many times, delivering in both countries short courses of lectures, and instructing private classes of physicians in his discoveries. He went to the United States to reside in 1864, and was appointed Professor of the Physiology and Pathology of the Nervous System at Harvard University, where he remained four years. Returning to Prance in 1869, he was appointed Professor in the École de Médecine at Paris. He went back to the United States in 1873, began practice in New York, and with Dr. Seguin commenced the publication of Archives of Scientific and Practical Medicine, but eventually returned to Paris, where he now lives. He has published many essays and papers giving the details of his discoveries, and also "Lectures on Paralysis of the Lower Extremities," 1872; and "Lectures on Functional Affections," 1873. He has received several prizes from the French Academy of Sciences, and in 1878 was elected to the chair of medicine in that body.