Exactly 200 years ago, the London surgeon-apothecary James Parkinson (1755-1824) published a 66-page-long booklet entitled An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, which contains the first clear clinical description of the shaking palsy or paralysis agitans, which we now refer to as Parkinson’s disease. However, the value of this essay was not fully recognized during Parkinson’s lifetime, which spanned the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. James Parkinson was one of the most singular figures of his time and place. He was successively or concomitantly a virulent political activist, a popular medical writer, a scholarly medical contributor, a highly appreciated parish doctor, a prominent amateur chemist, a devoted madhouse doctor, and a renowned paleontologist. It is that branch of geology that brought Parkinson fame during his lifetime. He was an insatiable collector of fossils, minerals, and shells that came to form the core of the museum that he set out at his home in Shoreditch, England. These specimens are beautifully illustrated in his Organic Remains of a Former World (1804-1811), a three-volume treatise that rapidly became a standard paleontology textbook. Parkinson was a founding member of the Geological Society of London, and in recognition of his contribution to the nascent field of paleontology his name was given to many fossils, particularly ammonites (e.g. Nautilus parkinsoni). Hence, we owe much to Mr. Parkinson, the Paleontologist, as he used to be referred to after his death, for such a vast and multifaceted contribution to natural science and medicine.

We investigated facial expressivity in 19 people with Parkinson's disease (PD; 14 men and 5 women) and 26 healthy controls (13 men and 13 women). Participants engaged in experimental situations that were designed to evoke emotional facial expressions, including watching video clips and holding conversations, and were asked to pose emotions and imitate nonemotional facial movements. Expressivity was measured with subjective rating scales, objective facial measurements (Facial Action Coding System), and self-report questionnaires. As expected, PD participants showed reduced spontaneous facial expressivity across experimental situations. PD participants also had more difficulty than controls posing emotional expressions and imitating nonemotional facial movements. Despite these difficulties, however, PD participants' overall level of expressivity was still tied to emotional experience and social context. (JINS, 2004, 10, 521–535.)