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Editorial
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Although he wrote only 72 papers—including addresses, abstracts and collections of articles in book form—throughout his career, Henry Head was arguably the most imaginative neurological clinician scientist of the 20th century; and he was certainly one of the most cultured. But in the originality lay a certain intellectual eccentricity; such that, reflecting on Head's achievements on the occasion of the centenary of his birth in 1961, Ronald Henson, Macdonald Critchley and Russell Brain were all qualified in their assessment of the lasting value of his work on epicritic and protopathic sensation, and on aphasia. Nonetheless, for Critchley, Head's ‘natural gusto drove him to grasp one of the thorniest problems in neurology: his obsessional traits ensured scrupulous and minute clinical scrutiny: his erudition embraced the continental literature: his critical bent showed him the weaknesses of accepted dogma as well as the strength of Jackson's ideas. Finally, his originality, disciplined by philosophy,
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