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Kinnier Wilson (1878–1937), like Ferrier before him, had come from Edinburgh to London to work at both King’s College Hospital and at the National Hospital, Queen Square.1 Wilson’s library of some 1500 books and many more reprints was stored around Oxford after the death of his medical son, A Bruce Kinnier Wilson (1917–1978), latterly in the Cairns library at the Radcliffe Infirmary. In 1996, thanks largely to the late John Potter, it was given to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, which had had a great medico-historical library for over 300 years (see fig 1).
Kinnier Wilson’s life and his great contributions to neurology have been described elsewhere.2 Briefly, he qualified in Edinburgh in 1902, and after two years in Paris with Pierre Marie and J Babinski, and in Leipzig with P Flechsig, he moved first to Charing Cross Hospital and then to King’s College Hospital, London, where he overlapped with Ferrier, and to Queen Square where he benefited from the wisdom of J Hughlings Jackson in his last years. His 1912 Edinburgh MD thesis on hepato-lenticular degeneration remains the nosographic template of what is known as Wilson’s disease, the treatable metabolic cause of which was found after his death.
Wilson died aged 59 in 1937 as he was completing his great Neurology text, published posthumously in 1940.3
Wilson apart, the two neurological giants concerned in the Kinnier Wilson library are Jackson and Ferrier; who interacted more than either did with Wilson. Both were quirky as well as great.
J Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911) joined the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square, in 1862, two years after its foundation, initially under the tutelage of the mercurial …