Thomas Laycock (physiologist)

[3] He went on to study at the University College in London and furthered his training in Paris in 1834 for two more years, where his instructors included Alfred Armand Velpeau (1795–1867) and Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872), renowned as an initiator of statistics.

[5] While in Paris, Laycock studied anatomy and physiology under Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin and Velpeau at la Pitié.

[5] During his time at the York Dispensary, he earned himself a reputation as a skilled physician, as well as a profound thinker, medical scientist, and prolific writer.

[2] Of eight potential contestants, Laycock was selected by the Edinburgh Town Council; however, he was not generally accepted by the public or by the people of the profession.

Browne (1805-1885) and was a major influence on his son, the psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938) During his mid-forties, Laycock suffered from phthisis (tuberculosis).

[9] He is buried a short distance from his home, in one of the upper terraces of St Johns Episcopal Church at the west end of Princes Street.

Unzer centralised the nervous system in the spinal cord, such that reflexes could occur even without a functional brain, which only controls conscious activity.

Through his teleological approach, he argued that the origins of the nervous system were based on a natural force which he named the "Unconsciously Acting Principle for Intelligence.

Laycock saw nature as purposeful in creating this force, which ultimately results in a self-conscious mind, and an unconscious intelligence where reflexes were seeded.

On insanity, his definition was: "a chronic disorder of the brain by which the mental condition of the individual is so modified that he is deprived wholly or in part of common sense.

Historians have a hard time crediting Laycock for his findings in the existence of the cerebral reflex and the continuity of the nervous system throughout the animal species because of his non-scientific methodology.

Laycock's ideas reached modern day acceptance through his student John Hughlings Jackson, who recast the concept of the continuity of nervous systems in animals through evolutionary proof.

Ivan Pavlov, Charles Scott Sherrington, and Sigmund Freud later expanded upon Laycock's philosophical observations of nervous function synthesis.