Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard: The Biography of a Tormented Genius

Genius and dilettantism often go hand in hand. Nowhere is this truer than in the life of Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard, the bilingual physician and neurologist who succeeded Claude Bernard as the Chair of Experimental Medicine at the College de France in Paris after having practiced in Paris, London and in the USA, especially in Harvard.

For most men, making one discovery of global importance would have sufficed to satisfy their curiosity and self-image. Not so Brown-Séquard. His explanati...