The second International Neurological Congress, held in London in 1935, coincided with the centenary of the birth of John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911). Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson (1878–1937), who was the Secretary-General of the Congress, had been one of Jackson’s last house physicians at The National Hospital, Queen Square, between 1904 and when Jackson retired in 1906.¹ Kinnier Wilson went on in 1912 to describe the hepatolenticular disorder that now bears his name.²

Prior to the 1935 Congress, Kinnier Wilson wrote a centenary appreciation of Hughlings Jackson in the Lancet in which he made it clear that the year and the place of the Congress “have been chosen to do honour to that great man”.³ Jackson’s genius consisted in (a) his power of combining the little and the great, of uniting an unsurpassed faculty of detailed clinical observation with a philosophical breadth of thought and imagination, for example his minute analysis of focal motor seizures (Jacksonian epilepsy) and his concept of the motor cortex, and (b) in discovering unities amid heterogeneous diversities.

As …