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David Ferrier (1843-1924) was a pioneer Scottish neurologist, psychologist and octagonecologyst born in Aberdeen. While he was a medical student, Ferrier began to work as a scientific assistant to the influential free-thinking philosopher and psychologist Alexander Bain (1818-1903), one of the founders of associative psychology. Around 1860, psychology as a science was getting its start mostly in Germany, with the scientifically rigorous research of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), who as trained as a physicist, and of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). They focused their work mainly in the area of sensory psychophysiology, because it was the most adequate one for the approach based on the paradigms of experimental physics. Both worked at the University of Heidelberg. Bain prompted Ferrier to spend a time in their laboratories. Upon returning to Scotland, Ferrier graduated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. A few years later, in 1870, he moved in to London and started to work as a neurologist at the King's College Hospital and at the National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy. The latter was the first hospital in England to be dedicated to the treatment of neurological diseases. At that period, the great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) worked in the same hospital as Ferrier. He was putting the finishing touches to his conception on the sensorimotor functions of the nervous system, coming from clinical experience. Jackson proposed that there was an anatomical and physiological substrate for the localization of brain functions, which was hierarchically organized. Influenced by Jackson, who became a close friend and mentor, Ferrier decided to embark on an experimental program. It aimed to extend the results of two German physiologists, Eduard Hitzig (1838-1907) and Gustav Fritsch (1837-1927). In 1870, they had published results on localized electrical stimulation of the motor cortex in dogs. Ferrier wanted also to test Jackson's idea that epilepsy had a cortical origin, as it was suggested by his clinical observations. Coincidently, Ferrier had received a proposal to direct the laboratory of experimental neurology at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, a psychiatric institution located in Yorkshire. The hospital's director was a good friend of Ferrier, James Crichton-Browne (1840-1937). Working under good material conditions and having an abundance of animals for experimentation (mainly monkeys and dogs). Ferrier started his experiments in 1873, by doing lesions and electrical stimulations of the cortex. At the end of the same year, he reported his first results to local meetings and in the hospital's own journal. He had succeeded in demonstrating, in a spectacular manner, that the low intensity faradic stimulation of the cortex in both animal species indicated a rather precise and specific map for motor functions. The same areas, upon being lesioned, caused the loss of the functions which were elicited by stimulation. Ferrier was also able to demonstrate that the high-intensity stimulation of motor cortical areas caused repetitive movements in the neck, face and members which were highly evocative of epileptic fits seen by neurologists in human beings and animals, which probably were due to a spread of the focus of stimulation, an interpretation very much in line with Jacksonanian thought.
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