Alexander Hughes Bennett

Born in 1848, Alexander Hughes Bennett studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and built his career in London after further training in London and Paris. He was the son of the physician John Hughes Bennett, but made his own name through work on diseases of the nervous system, especially epilepsy and the clinical use of electricity in diagnosis.

Bennett wrote important medical studies, including A Statistical Inquiry into the Nature and Treatment of Epilepsy and A Practical Treatise on Electro-Diagnosis in Diseases of the Nervous System. His work reflects the careful, observation-based medicine of the late 19th century, when doctors were trying to understand the brain and nerves with greater precision.

He is most often linked with the famous 1884 brain-tumour case in which he diagnosed and localized the lesion, leading surgeon Rickman Godlee to operate. That episode is widely treated as a landmark in the history of neurology and neurosurgery. Bennett died in 1901.