Ferrier Lecture - The contribution of clinical observation to cerebral physiology

David Ferrier, whom this lecture commemorates, was both an experimental physiologist and a clinician. It is in virtue of his achievement in the first role that he is remembered to-day, and the man to whom Sherrington dedicated The integrative action of the nervous system, must indeed have had elements of greatness in him. Yet, if he does not rank with the great clinicians of his time (Hughlings Jackson, Gowers, Bastian and others in this country who were his contemporaries in the Fellowship of this Society, not to mention those in other lands), it is not because the clinical method failed him as an instrument of research, but rather that his phase of active original thought ended when he left the laboratory, and that he lacked the genius for the clinical discipline that these men so signally displayed. This may, perhaps, explain how he persuaded himself—in words quoted by my predecessor in this lectureship three years ago—that ‘experiments on animals, under condition selected and varied at the will of the experimenter, are alone capable of furnishing precise data for sound indications as to the functions of the brain and its various parts’.