Brown-Séquard's spinal epilepsy.

The experiments which led to the discovery of the crossing sensory pathways in the spinal cord, and made Charles-ltdouard Brown-Sequard (1817-1894) famous, established the basis of his theories on the origin of epilepsy. This work is not well-known, but Brown-Sequard's spinal epilepsy remained a clinical entity until the beginning of the twentieth century. He observed that spinal epilepsy could be transmitted to the offspring of animals used in experiments. This artificially induced hereditary epilepsy, although criticized by many, was gratefully accepted by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and used in his own theories. In this article I examine the development of Brown-Sequard's ideas on epilepsy against the background of contemporary theories of the disease, the nature of heredity and the way the concept was used by Darwin, and the relationship between the two scientists.