Paton Prize lecture winner 2024: Gordon Holmes and the Irish spirit of adventure: lessons for modern thinkers

This lecture is given in honour of Sir William Paton (1917–1993), physiologist, pharmacologist and Fellow of the Royal Society. His passion for the history of medicine led to generous donations to the Society, who consequently founded the Paton Prize Fund for historical research. After his death, this eponymous Prize Lecture was debuted in 1994. It has been a singular honour for me to acclaim the similarly influential Irish neurologist Gordon Morgan Holmes (1876–1965), whose work has been a particular preoccupation of mine for my entire career, since I first heard of him as an undergraduate in 1991. Holmes’ work on the World War I battlefield completely transformed neurology, in terms both of clinical practice and its knowledge base. Clinical techniques developed by him at that time remain established current practice, and his visual field maps were not superseded for 73 years. His legacy to neurology is extensive, with his editorship of the journal Brain from 1922 to 1937. He had a profound influence both here and across the Atlantic, evinced by global warm tributes published on his death in 1965. The Lecture concentrates on a confluence of events and circumstances existing in the Flanders trenches that met a man singularly suited to overcoming the challenges posed. He received training in neuroanatomy from the German anatomists and clinical skills from the British greats in the National Hospital Queen Square. Coupled with an Irish adventurousness and insatiable curiosity, this experience presaged advances that resonate >100 years on. His legacy speaks profoundly of curiosity, interdisciplinarity and reconciliation.