PARKINSON, James (1755-1824) - photo 1
PARKINSON, James (1755-1824) - photo 2

PARKINSON, James (1755-1824)

Lot 194
10.12.2025 12:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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CHRISTIE'S
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1514542
Lot 194 | PARKINSON, James (1755-1824)
Estimate value
£ 50 000 – 70 000
PARKINSON, James (1755-1824)
An Essay on the Shaking Palsy. London: Whittingham and Rowland for Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817.
Exceptionally rare first edition of a foundational work of neurology: Parkinson’s essay on the disease that would later bear his name. No copy has appeared at auction since the Haskell F. Norman sale (Christie’s NY, 1998).

James Parkinson was an English surgeon, political activist, geologist, palaeontologist, and advocate for social reform and the rights of the mentally ill. His medical publications ranged from the first English description of acute appendicitis to the neurological complications of being struck by lightning, but his most enduring contribution is undoubtedly his extraordinary 1817 publication An Essay on the Shaking Palsy. Parkinson’s Essay offers the first detailed account of the neurological condition which he referred to as the ‘shaking palsy,’ or paralysis agitans, and which the influential French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot would later name ‘Parkinson’s disease’ in recognition of this work. Across a slim 66-page pamphlet, the author puts forward clinical case studies of six patients, only three of which were actually examined by Parkinson, the other sufferers being seen only at a distance or interviewed briefly after he noticed them on the street. From these six vignettes, Parkinson creates a coherent account of a distinct neurological disorder which he defines as being characterised by ‘involuntary tremulous motion, with lessened muscular power, in parts not in action and even when supported; with a propensity to bend the trunk forward, and to pass from a walking to a running pace: the senses and intellects being uninjured.’ In doing so, he reframes a collection of previously unlinked symptoms into a single nosological entity. Though he can offer no cure, he is optimistic that one may be forthcoming, insisting that his work is intended to excite ‘the attention of those, who may point out the most appropriate means of relieving a tedious and most distressing malady’.

‘As a medical treatise, Parkinson's Essay is a masterful clinical exposition. Over five short chapters, the author elegantly elucidates both the history and defining features of the disease, distinguishes it from "other diseases with which it may be confounded", and postulates both a proximate cause and a potential remedy. Except perhaps for its necessarily limited anatomical insights - a drawback that Parkinson acknowledges repeatedly throughout the work - the Essay provides a remarkable objective account of the disease’ (Toodayan). Its importance and extreme rarity, even in the 19th century, is attested to by Charcot in a lecture to French medical students at the Salpêtrière hospital in 1887: ‘It is a small pamphlet almost impossible to find […] As short as the work is, it contains a number of superb ideas […] Read the entire book and it will provide you with the satisfaction and knowledge that one always gleans from a direct clinical description made by an honest and careful observer’.

Garrison-Morton 4690; Norman 1642; Toodayan, N., ‘James Parkinson's Essay on the shaking palsy, 1817–2017’, Medical Journal of Australia, 208: 384-386 (2018); cf. Goetz, C. G., ‘The History of Parkinson's Disease: early clinical descriptions and neurological therapies’, Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med (2011); Lees, A., ‘An essay on the shaking palsy’, Brain, (March 2017); Silver, M. and Factor, S. A., ‘History of Parkinsonism’, in Neurobiology of Disease (2016).

Octavo (205 x 129mm). (Title washed and pressed, tipped in and 5mm short at lower margin, with faint dampstain and small area of soiling, last few leaves with small dark stains, final leaf with minor soiling in gutter.) 20th-century green quarter burgundy morocco by Zaehnsdorf. Provenance: Royal Society of Medicine (ink stamp on title dated 13 Nov 1934).
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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10.12.2025 – 10.12.2025
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