ABSTRACT
James Parkinson was a medical practitioner in London who is best remembered for his Essay on the Shaking Palsy, published in 1817. In it he described how some of his patients experienced great difficulty in moving and performing simple everyday tasks, slowly deteriorating to the point where they could no longer look after themselves. This crippling movement disorder was originally called paralysis agitans, after the cardinal symptoms of poverty of movement and tremor, but nowadays we know it as Parkinson’s disease.
