Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911) was born in the village of Green Hammerton in the parish of Whixley in Yorkshire, UK. In 1850 at the age of 15 years, he was apprenticed to Dr Anderson, a general practitioner in York, and he later trained in medicine at the York Medical School and St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, from where he qualified initially as a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1856. His subsequent career as a physician at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic and at the London Hospital, and his influence on his colleagues and on our understanding of neurological diseases, especially epilepsy and disorders of language and higher nervous activity, have been thoroughly documented, most recently by Critchley and Critchley,¹ who regard him as the father of English neurology.

Little is known, however, of Jackson’s early education. According to Taylor,² Jackson probably attended the village school at Green Hammerton, followed by boarding schools in Tadcaster, Yorkshire, and Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, his mother having died …