Sir Gordon Holmes.

FORTY MILES from Dublin at Castlebellingham on the coast of Co. Louth, Gordon Morgan Holmes was born in Dillon House on 22 February 1876. A scholar at Trinity College Dublin, he graduated B.A. in 1897, being senior moderator and gold medallist, and qualified in medicine the following year. After serving as a resident medical officer in the Richmond Asylum (now St. Brendan's Hospital), he studied briefly in Berlin before devoting two years to neuroanatomical research in the Senckenberg Institute at Frankfurt-am-Main, under the guidance of Carl Weigert (1845-1904) and Ludwig Edinger (1855-1918), before taking a house-physicianship at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London, in 1902, where he became a member of the honorary staff in 1909. He was consultant to the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital (Moorfields Eye Hospital) and Charing Cross Hospital, where his diagnostic wisdom helped many patients. Indirectly, too, patients in many lands were to benefit from his skill, for he was above all a teacher, brusque, demanding, tireless, and every aspirant to neurology sought to be his house-physician. Accepting only facts and eschewing speculation, Holmes developed a unique knowledge of the functions of the nervous system in man, especially with regard to cerebral localization and cerebellar symptomatology, and when he published in 1946 his Introduction to clinical neurology' it became the physiological basis for the interpretation and elucidation of neurological disorders. His incisive clarity brought him the editorship of Brain, the most influential neurological journal at the time. Proceeding M.D. in 1903, Holmes took the M.R.C.P. of London in 1908 and was elected a Fellow six years later. The outstanding event of those early days was the classic he and Henry Head (1861-1940) contributed to Brain in 1911 on "Sensory disturbances from cerebral lesions".2 This was the first systematic account of the functions of the thalamus and its relationship to the cerebral cortex. Subsequently Holmes (1927)3 pointed out that the freshness of Head's point of view lay in asking not whether a sensation was lost, diminished or spared by a cortical lesion, but what qualities of sensation are localized in the cortex. This task required great refinement of sensory examination and the 1911 paper marked the introduction into clinical neurology of precise methods for mapping the skin. Holmes was thus well prepared to examine the results of injury to the nervous system suffered by the soldiers in Flanders, where he served in the field. Later he became consulting neurologist to the Ministry of Pensions, and his extensive experience allowed him to interpret the signs of spinal injury (Goulstonian Lecture