Alexander Robertson (1834–1908): Glasgow’s Pioneer Aphasiologist and Epileptologist

Mervyn Eadie

Alexander Robertson (1834-1908) was a Glasgow physician whose professional career was involved mainly with institutional-based practice but who published significant insights into the anatomical background to aphasia (1867) and the mechanisms of focal epileptogenesis (1869). His aphasiology ideas, including his suggestion that disconnection between cerebral centers involved in speech was responsible for the phenomenon, made him one of the earliest members of the late-nineteenth-century school of aphasia diagram makers. His view of epileptogenesis was that contralateral convulsing arose from irritation in a local area of pathology on the surface of the cerebral cortex after the irritation spread to a cortical motor center and then down the motor pathway to the striatum, while spreading within the cortex itself caused loss of consciousness. This interpretation contains much of the essence of the present-day understanding of cortical epileptogenesis. The origin of this interpretation is often attributed to John Hughlings Jackson, but Robertson published the idea in full a year or two prior to Jackson. However, Robertson's original insights were hardly noticed at the time they were published and have since almost entirely been ignored.