Epigraph Vol. 9 Issue 1, Winter 2007

Episcope

D. Denny-Brown: The electro-encephalogram in epilepsy. A review.
Epilepsia, New York, 1938, 1: 124-127

Denny Brown
Portrait of Denny Brown from Queen Square Collection

The featured article in this issue of Episcope is a review of the EEG in epilepsy by Derek Denny-Brown. Denny-Brown was born in New Zealand, moved to Oxford to work with Charles Sherrington and in 1928 took up his medical practice at the National Hospital Queen Square, where he worked until 1941. Here he worked with a series of the world’s leading neurologists, including Francis Walshe future editor of Epilepsia. Gordon Holmes and Charles Symonds. With the advent of war, he took up the Chair in Neurology at Harvard. His classic book – the Reflex Activity of the Spinal Cord – was published by Oxford in 1932. In 1946 he was appointed to the James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology at Harvard, which he held for 19 years. His research library remains, featuring particularly fascinating films of his lesioning experiments. He trained a whole generation of academic neurologists and was undoubtedly the most important figure in the field of his generation. He seems to have published one paper in Epilepsia, which was this review. It is a short review, the main interest of which is the light it throws on the contemporary position of EEG.

Electroencephalography had only just been introduced, and two years earlier, Gibbs, Lennox and Gibbs had published their famous report on the EEG during petit mal attacks. The EEG provided, in this paper, a physiological method of measuring epilepsy objectively – for the very first time. The excitement was palpable. Denny Brown reviews this paper and the subsequent papers from Gibbs and Gibbs, Lennox, Golla, and Grey Walter. Denny-Brown, presciently, recognised the importance of interictal abnormalities as indicating an epileptic liability. As he concluded ‘The extension of further studies [of EEG in epilepsy] become of the greatest importance to all interested in epilepsy. From a distance of nearly 70 years, this prediction seems mundane, but at the time was visionary. EEG made great advances in Boston in the years after 1936 and Denny-Brown was on the scene at the time, and perhaps it is surprising that he did not focus his own research in this area. Denny-Brown published over 300 papers in the neurological literature, but only three were devoted to epilepsy. The application of such as a formidable intellect might have advanced epilepsy enormously.

Denny Brown Geneology from Neurotree

An amusing "genealogy" of Denny-Brown from Neurotree. View in Neurotree.