James Parkinson

James Parkinson lived from 1755 to 1824 and was an English surgeon and apothecary who also worked as a geologist and palaeontologist and was active as a political campaigner. In medicine he is remembered for his 1817 work An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, in which he was the first to describe the condition he called paralysis agitans. Decades later the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot renamed that condition Parkinson's disease in his honour, so the illness now carries the name of the English practitioner who first set out its features. His wider career across medicine, natural science and politics shows how broad a physician's interests could be in the late eighteenth century.