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Quantitative management of contraction in lowest level co-ordination. Hughlings Jackson Lecture. (Given January 29, 1931). By C.S. Sherrington. Brain 1931: 54; 1–28
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‘Compact in Hughlings Jackson was a fine vein of pithy thought and phrase.’ Thus, Sherrington introduces the printed version of his Hughlings Jackson lecture, delivered only 2 months before publication (in contrast to the Silliman lectures that took 2 years to see through the press). He reminds us of Jackson's hierarchies—the nervous centres rising in three tiers or levels: ‘no illustrations happier than the notable studies of asynergia, rigidity and tremor’ (in striatal disease) representing a ‘pulling to pieces from the top downwards ... so likewise physiological experiment ... starts lower ... a rump of mechanism, a stump of spinal cord ... these it interrogates through perhaps a single afferent for answer by a single efferent ... its hope is, since bottom is basal, to reach bottom, though even there the elemental may not prove to be the simple’. At that lowest Jacksonian level is the ‘old-fashioned if time honoured
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