John Hughlings Jackson: A Clinical Scientist

Hughlings Jackson’s work formed a significant link in the transfer-network of Spencerian Lamarckism and neo-Lamarckism models and mechanisms that proved to be so generative for the emerging social sciences of the late nineteenth century, particularly psychology. I discuss Jackson’s endeavor within the contemporary medical context, showing how he constructed meticulous modes of following his patients, while drawing on Spencer’s notions of evolutionary hierarchies, applying them to the nervous system. Yet, he uncoupled the Spencerian direct relation between degree of plasticity, complexity, and organization and inversed the relations among them. This inversion impacted his choice of ‘methodological parallelism,’ and he later on deleted ‘unconscious states’ from his theorizing. Thus I deal with a cluster of philosophical issues of concern to a clinical evolutionary scientist: the relations of brain, mind, body, consciousness, the unconscious, and evolutionary ‘self/person’. My argument is two-pronged: