William Henry Broadbent (1835-1907) as a neurologist

By the end of his career, Sir William Broadbent (1835-1907) had become an eminent London general physician who had been appointed Physician-in-Ordinary to King Edward VII and to the Prince of Wales. Previously he had been Physician-in-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. At earlier stages in his professional life, he had played a significant role in the development of clinical neurology in Victorian-era Britain. In 1866, he had enunciated a principle (Broadbent's hypothesis) that for the first time satisfactorily accounted for the mechanisms by which the trunk and bulbar muscles and the upper face were spared in hemiplegia. He had also carried out original investigations into the distribution of fiber tracts in the human cerebral hemispheres. At intervals over the years, he published on aspects of aphasia and developed a rather complicated though logical conceptual schema of the presumed anatomical background to the process of speech, based on clinic-pathological correlations. His role in all this neurological research and his other contributions on subjects such as neurosyphilis have largely been forgotten by subsequent generations.