Background

Charles Edward Beevor was born on June 12, 1854, in London, England. Beevor was the eldest son of Charles Beevor, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Elizabeth Burrell.

Education

Beevor was first educated at Blackheath Proprietary School, London, and University College, London. Beevor received Bachelor of Medicine in 1879 and the Doctor of Medicine in 1881. From 1882 to 1883 he studied in Austria, Germany, and France with Carl Weigert, Julius Cohnheim, Wilhelm Heinrich Erb, and others.

Career

Beevor was appointed an assistant physician to the National Hospital, Queen Square, London, in 1883 and to the Great (later Royal) Northern Central Hospital in 1885. He became a full physician at each of these hospitals but was able to carry out neurophysiological investigations in addition to practicing clinical neurology. Essentially, Beevor was an excellent clinical neurologist whose main ambition was to make a possible more accurate diagnosis of diseases of the nervous system. He was also, however, a general physician and practiced internal medicine as well as neurology for many years. His Diseases of the Nervous System: A Handbook for Students and Practitioners (1898) revealed his clinical ability as well as his literary skill, and his work on the diagnosis and localization of cerebral tumors was outstanding.

From 1883 to 1887 Beevor collaborated with Victor Horsley at the Brown Institution in London. They extended the work of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, Eduard Hitzig, and David Ferrier on the representation of a function in the cerebral cortex. In particular, they studied the motor region in monkeys by means of electrical stimulation and then carried out similar investigations on the internal capsule. Minute representation of movement could be mapped at each site. This work was an important landmark in the development of the concept of cerebral localization, and Beevor became widely known after it was published (1887-1891). Beevor meticulously observed the function of muscles and muscle groups both in health and in disease. His Croonian lectures given before the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1903 and published in 1904 embodied his findings, which he linked to the earlier studies he had made on the motor cortex of the cerebral hemisphere.

Stimulated by the work of Otto Heubner (1872) and Henri Duret (1874), Beevor carried out experiments on the human brain in order to discover the areas of distribution of the five main arteries. He injected colored gelatin into all five vessels simultaneously, under constant pressure. His findings, which appeared in 1908 and were of outstanding importance, were the first accurate ones to be published. Unfortunately, Beevor agreed with Duret that the brain arteries were end-arteries, each with its own territory. This view dominated anatomical and pathological considerations of cerebral circulation for two decades and was finally disproved by R. A. Pfeifer in 1928. It is now known that Beevor’s experiments and the deductions derived from them were incorrect and that all parts of the cerebral cortex are linked by an anastomosing vascular network.

Achievements

• Beevor's most significant contributions were in the field of the cerebral blood circulation. He not only added volumes to the knowledge of the anatomy of the human body but also furthered the study of Neurology as a discipline. He is probably the most well known for the eponymous neurological sign which is characteristic for the presence of a lesion at the level of T10, but he had more significant contributions in the fields of cerebral localization and the blood supply of the brain. However, Beevor’s sign remains one of the most commonly used clinical tests to localize the level of spinal trauma.
  
  Also, his other achievement was in him to be suggestive of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. While the initial description of the Beevor sign has traditionally been attributed to his 1903 Croonian Lectures, he actually first described his sign in his 1898 textbook Diseases of the Nervous System: A Handbook for Students and Practitioners. In addition to his eponymous sign, Beevor also made significant contributions to the understanding of the representation of motor movements in the cerebral cortex, and, of more importance, utilized a novel method to identify cerebral vascular territory maps that are still utilized by neurologists today.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Croonian Lectures on Muscular Movements and Their Representation in the Central Nervous System: Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians of London 1903
  • Diseases Of The Nervous System: A Handbook For Students And Practitioners 1898

Membership

Beevor became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1878. He was elected a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1882 and became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1888. He was also a member of the Neurological Society and where he served as a president from 1907.

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  Royal College of Surgeons of England , United Kingdom

  1878 - 1908

Personality

Beevor was a man of pleasant yet simple personality and graceful courtesy, with a keen sense of humor and considerable musical talent. His powers of observation, his industry, and his precision as a recorder were unsurpassed, and he was intensely self-critical. He possessed such marked scientific caution that occasionally he would not publish the results of his investigations if they seemed to refute established opinion. He was retiring, modest, and quite unselfish.

Interests

• music

Connections

On December 5, 1882, Beevor married Blanche Adine Leadam, who bore him a son and a daughter.

Father:

Charles Beevor

Mother:

Elizabeth Burrell

Wife:

Blanche Adine Leadam

collaborator:

Victor Alexander Haden Horsley

Sir Victor Alexander Haden Horsley (14 April 1857 – 16 July 1916) was an accomplished scientist and professor. From 1883 to 1887 Beevor collaborated with Victor Horsley at the Brown Institution in London.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1970