The History of James Parkinson

What did James Parkinson look like?

/ Mark Sloan / 2 Comments

In an earlier post I wrote about James Parkinson, the British physician who, in 1817, described what would later be called Parkinson’s disease. He had a multi-faceted, truly remarkable life – sort of a British Benjamin Franklin. Parkinson was, in addition to being a renowned physician, a political radical, a best-selling author, an inventor, a crusader for the mentally ill and against child labor, and one of the world’s foremost experts on geology, paleontology, cardiac resuscitation, rabies, and lightning strike injuries.

Given all that, you’d figure it would be easy to discover what the man looked like. After all, museums, palaces, and private mansions throughout Great Britain are festooned with 18th and 19th century oil portraits of virtually every British man (and some women) of means. Yet, inexplicably, no portrait of Parkinson survives.

Fame certainly wasn’t a prerequisite for portrait-sitting in those days. This fact is brought home poignantly by the abundance of paintings of now-unknown subjects – people who, during their lives somehow merited a grand portrait but then were forgotten, quickly or otherwise. Take the case of “An Unknown Man” by the obscure British portraitist Tilly Kittle (1735-1786).1

“An Unknown Man.” (Artist: Tilly Kittle. Date: unknown.)

In Kittle’s rendering, Unknown Man is a plump, baby-faced, apparently wealthy young fellow, surrounded by props – the books, the Roman column, the quill poised in the the inkwell – that would imply a man of some learning and power.  His delicate hands, though, hint at a life of epicurean leisure, likely lived at the expense of servants and peasants. His prominently (proudly?) displayed belly, which threatens to overpower the buttons of his waistcoat, suggests nothing so much as a man about to give birth to twins. Taking a wild stab, I would guess that the young Mr. Man inherited his riches.2

For decades everyone “knew” what James Parkinson looked like – or at least they thought they did. They assumed he was the square-headed, bushy-faced man in the accompanying photograph:

Dr. Parkinson, I presume…

In truth, while he was a James Parkinson, he was not the James Parkinson. The James Parkinson in the photo was, in fact, an Irishman who sailed to Australia during the 1850s gold rush and wound up a Tasmanian lighthouse keeper. He was born eight years after “our” James Parkinson’s death. The tipoff? The first photograph of a human face was taken in 1839, more than a decade after Dr. Parkinson’s death.

This lack of a portrait seemed unjust to me, given the greatness of the man. So, this being the 21st century and all, I decided to put technology on the case – specifically the much loved and loathed new versions of artificial intelligence. I gave DALL-E, the artsy part of openAI’s suite of A.I. programs, its marching orders: “Paint an oil portrait of Dr. James Parkinson, British, in the 18th century style of Tilly Kittle.”

And here’s what I got…

James Parkinson. (“Artist”: A.I. DALL-E, 2023)

Hmm. Looks suspiciously like a slimmed down, age-progressed version of “An Unknown Man,” right down to the left-eyed, thousand-yard stare3 and the proto-1960s flip hairstyle. I thought A.I. would be a bit subtler in its plagiarizing.

I’m not sure if Tilly Kittle would feel flattered or litigious. No doubt some future A.I. iteration will answer that question for him…

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1 Tilly Kittle was a British portrait painter who, after middling success in his early career in England, struck out for India, where he grew rich painting “nabobs and princes,” according to his bio in The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. He returned to London after a decade, where he soon acquired a wife, a mountain of debt, and few clients. After fleeing to Ireland to escape his creditors, he decided to try his luck in India again, but this time died en route, somewhere in present-day Iraq. According to the Oxford Dictionary entry, Kittle is best remembered for ranking “fairly high among the lesser portraitists of his time.” Ouch!

2 Kittle may have been a more perceptive capturer of his subjects’ inner selves than he’s been given credit for. Try this experiment: click on the larger copy of “An Unknown Man” here, cover one side of his face and then the other. You’ll see the right side shows an affable-if-entitled trust fund baby; the left side, meanwhile, reveals the thousand-yard stare of a fellow who just learned, say, that he’s about to give birth to twins.

3 Try the left-right face experiment described in footnote #2 on the A.I. portrait – same result!

Happy ‘World Parkinson’s Day’…and the History of James Parkinson, No.2!

/ Mark Sloan / 2 Comments

“Dr James Parkinson (1755 – 1824)
Born 11 April 1755, James Parkinson is most famous for his essay ‘An Essay on the Shaking Palsy’ in 1817, which first recognised Parkinson’s as a medical condition.”

– James Parkinson’s biography (in its entirety) on the World Parkinson’s Day website

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Parkinson’s Europe established World Parkinson’s Day in 1997 to focus the world’s attention on Parkinson’s disease, the people who live with it, and current research in pursuit of better treatments and, ultimately, a cure.

World Parkinson’s Day is celebrated every year on April 11 – James Parkinson’s birthday – and honors the man who put my current diagnosis on the medical map. But to remember Parkinson solely for his eponymous disease (and with a single-sentence biography) would be to shortchange both him and us. He was an immensely talented man, one who exerted considerable influence on late-18th and early-19th century British science, politics, and society. With this post, the second of I’m-not-sure-how-many, I continue the story of James Parkinson.

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If, shortly before his death in 1824, you had asked James Parkinson to guess which of his life’s many accomplishments would still be celebrated nearly 200 years into the future, he likely would have chosen his research on fossils (of which he was considered a world expert) and geology. In honor of his contributions to the field, Parkinson had a number of fossilized creatures named for him, including the doubly-named ammonite, Parkinsonia parkinsoni. He is rightfully considered one of the founders of scientific paleontology.

Or, he might have picked one of his many medical successes: pioneering work on cardiac resuscitation (he was the first physician to be credited with “bringing back to life someone considered dead”), lightning-strike injuries, hernias*, appendicitis, gout, and a number of infectious diseases, including rabies and typhus.

He might also have chosen his advocacy on behalf of the mentally ill, particularly his reforms of Britain’s “mad-houses,” or his efforts to alleviate some of the era’s many other social ills: child abuse, child labor, and abysmal medical care for the poor.

A best-selling author in Britain and the United States, Parkinson might assume that you’re referring to one of his many books – say, his popular volumes on parenting, medical advice, and other health-related topics; The Chemical Pocket-Book (a chemistry textbook); or his magnum opus, Organic Remains of a Former World – a richly illustrated, three-volume treatise on the identification and interpretation of fossils. Organic Remains drove much of early-19th-century Britain’s “fossil-mania” and inspired the poets Alfred Lord Tennyson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.**

“Organic Remains of a Former World” (1804)

Finally, he might have chosen his political activism as the thing people would still be talking about in 2023. A champion of the common man and supporter of the French Revolution, Parkinson was called to testify by British authorities in 1795 in an alleged plot to assassinate the King and was nearly charged with treason himself. Appearing before a suspicious Privy Council – a tribunal that included, among others, the prime minister and attorney general of Great Britain – Parkinson talked his way out of trouble, narrowly escaping a long sentence in one of London’s dismal prisons, deportation to Australia, or even execution.*** His skill and courage in out-debating the Council members, as recorded in the Council transcripts, is remarkable.

Imagine his surprise, then, when you tell him that no, it’s none of those things…the accomplishment for which you’ll be best remembered centuries from now is (drumroll…) Parkinson’s disease! An awkward moment passes. You’d have to excuse his look of bafflement, as he wouldn’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Because, you see, Parkinson’s wasn’t “Parkinson’s” to Parkinson; “his” disease wouldn’t be named for him until a half-century after his death.

The pamphlet he wrote about the disease, titled “An Essay on The Shaking Palsy“, was published in 1817, a few years before he died. It was based on Parkinson’s insightful observations of just six individuals, including three he only saw from time to time, walking through the market near his home. While other physicians had described individual signs and symptoms of the malady – tremors, stooped posture, slowness in moving, and such – Parkinson was the first to recognize that these were all part of a single, slowly progressive neurologic disease. After publishing “An Essay on The Shaking Palsy,” Parkinson tended to downplay his key role in its discovery – to his mind, he hadn’t discovered the cause or a cure, so what was there to crow about?****

Parkinson could be forgiven for not guessing the reason we still celebrate his birthday today. Compared to discovering traces of vanished worlds, writing best sellers, improving medical care for ordinary people, or verbally jousting with a prime minister intent on chopping him into pieces, “The Shaking Palsy” was more footnote than main event. At least that’s how Parkinson might have seen it; to me, the man and his many contributions to humanity are a source of wonder.

So, Happy World Parkinson’s Day! Please give a thought to James Parkinson and his remarkable career on April 11 – his 268th birthday. Then visit the Parkinson’s Foundation, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, the Davis Phinney Foundation, the Parkinson’s Association of Northern California (PANC), or the websites of one of the many other PD advocacy groups to learn how you can help in the fight against Parkinson’s disease!

(Next up in the “History of James Parkinson” series: If we’re going to take the full measure of James Parkinson’s magnificent career, we’ll need to start from the beginning. And that beginning begins in Parkinson’s lifelong hometown of Hoxton, a small village located a mile north of Bishopsgate, one of the medieval entry-points into the city of London…)

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*Parkinson’s hernia truss design (1802) is the template for today’s trusses, with only a few modifications.

**Shelley collected Parkinson’s writings; Byron’s poem Don Juan makes reference to Organic Remains; and in the poem, In Memoriam, Tennyson gazes at fossils encased in the walls of a stone quarry and muses: “From scarped cliff and quarried stone/ She cries ‘A thousand types are gone:/ I care for nothing, all shall go… (Kind of bleak, that.)

***The punishment for treason was grisly: the condemned was “hanged, drawn, and quartered,” a brutal form of execution in which the victim was hanged from a gallows, then disemboweled while still alive (drawn), and finally beheaded and dismembered (quartered). (Way bleaker than Tennyson…)

****He’d also be shocked, no doubt, to learn that a cure for Parkinson’s disease still eludes modern science.

The history of James Parkinson, Part 1

/ Mark Sloan / 2 Comments

Introduction: Why don’t they name diseases after people anymore?

My aunt died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (better known today as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS) in the 1980s. A cruel disorder that progressively weakens the muscles of its victims until they can no longer move or breathe, her death was a grim, protracted, miserable ordeal, much like Gehrig’s a half century earlier. Gehrig, a New York Yankee legend and one of the greatest baseball players ever, was just 37 years old when he died in 1941. 

If you’ve never heard of Lou Gehrig, or only have a vague idea of who he was, you’ve hit on one of the reasons that diseases are rarely named for individuals anymore. People – even once-world-famous ones like Gehrig – eventually fade from public memory. Gehrig went from being the New York Yankees’ “Iron Horse” in his prime, to the face of a pitiless disease for a generation or two, to something of an afterthought today. *

Lou Gehrig (1903-1941): An American icon

There are other reasons for shying away from naming diseases for people, including the fact that the person credited with discovering the disease often didn’t actually do so, or at least, not by themselves. Medical archives are filled with the unrecognized contributions of junior researchers—often women—and scientists of color. White male scientists, particularly those in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, had no qualms about hogging all the credit for themselves. **

Then there’s the issue of the namesake’s behavior, particularly when that behavior involves war crimes. Take the case of Hans Reiter, a German physician who first described what came to be known as Reiter’s syndrome: a triad of arthritis, urethritis (a painful inflammation of the urethra), and uveitis (a painful inflammation of the eye). Reiter’s syndrome was the term I memorized in medical school in the 1970s; I never gave a second thought to who Reiter was, or what he did with the rest of his life.

But Hans Reiter had a very dark side: a fanatical Nazi, he was the physician in charge of “quality control” at the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II. There, he directed hideous research on prisoners, many of whom died. (His experiments with a failed typhus vaccine alone killed more than 200.) 

Hans Reiter (1881-1969) – A really bad man

As if murdering innocent people weren’t enough, it also turned out that Reiter wasn’t even the first individual to describe “Reiter’s” syndrome – he was about 200 years late on that one – and that he was way off base as to the cause (he blamed a syphilis-like bacteria). Although it took several decades, the medical community ultimately booted Reiter and renamed his syndrome reactive arthritis. ***

So, why has James Parkinson been spared the bum’s rush? Why does he still own his eponymous disease, while bad actors like Reiter (and some good ones, too) have been consigned to history’s dustbin? As we’ll see in upcoming posts in the “History” series, Parkinson’s longevity is due to a combination of modesty, timing, and a fascinating, incredibly productive life. 

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* In fairness, ALS was already ALS long before Lou Gehrig. (It was named in 1874 by the French physician Jean-Martin Charcot; coincidentally, Charcot also popularized the term, “Parkinson’s disease.”). The huge public outpouring of grief following Gehrig’s death led to the Lou Gehrig’s Disease/ALS connection—a link that no doubt gave a boost to ALS fundraising efforts.

** One example: Alice Ball (1892-1916), a Black researcher at the University of Hawaii, developed the first effective treatment for leprosy. When she died at age 24, possibly due to a lab accident involving chlorine gas, a white male colleague claimed the discovery for himself. It took the University of Hawaii nearly 90 years to formally recognize her work.

***Reiter spent a shockingly brief time in prison for his deeds, gaining early release possibly in exchange for helping the Allies with their biological warfare programs. (Yikes!)