Against vivisection: Charcot and Pitres' discovery of the human motor cortex and the birth of modern neurosurgery and of the surgical treatment of epilepsy.

This article addresses the discrepancy between Edouard Hitzig's and David Ferrier's findings on the cortical localization of movements in animals and Jean-Martin Charcot's findings in humans. The results of Hitzig's and Ferrier's vivisections were criticized by experimentalists in England and France as discordant, irreproducible, and inconclusive, and they were rejected by clinicians as irrelevant. Charcot addressed the gap between animal and human motor function by correlating motor deficits and focal epileptic seizures in patients to their autopsy findings. By this method he discovered the functional organization of the human motor cortex and produced the first accurate human motor brain map. Ferrier, William Osler, and Hughlings Jackson acknowledged Charcot's findings, and his findings guided the first neurosurgeons in localizing and resecting intracranial mass lesions presenting with focal epileptic seizures. Although his contributions in these fields have been neglected by modern historians, Charcot made significant contributions to the neurobiology of the human motor system, to epileptology, and to the birth of modern neurosurgery.