MacDonald Critchley

Macdonald Critchley CBE (2 February 1900 – 15 October 1997) was a British neurologist. He was former president of the World Federation of Neurology, and the author of over 200 published articles on neurology and 20 books, including The Parietal Lobes, Aphasiology, and biographies of James Parkinson and Sir William Gowers.

Biography Macdonald Critchley was born at Bristol, son of gas collector Arthur Frank Critchley and Rosina Matilda (née White); he was educated in Bristol and received his medical degree from the University of Bristol. He served with the Royal Flying Corps.

During World War II he was a Consulting Neurologist in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve based at HMS Drake.

His contributions to knowledge depended not on technology, but on his power of observation and meticulous dissection of human sensibility and behaviour. The best known of his works were those on aphasia and the parietal lobes. and secondly Eileen Hargreaves, whom he married in 1974.

He lived at Hughlings House (named in honour of John Hughlings Jackson), at Nether Stowey in Somerset, where he died on 15 October 1997, aged 97.

In 2013 the weekly undergraduate teaching round at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen Square was named after him - the Critchley Round.

Associated eponyms Adie-Critchley syndrome: A syndrome of forced grasping and groping. Klein-Levine- Critchley syndrome: A syndrome of hypersoomnia and hyperphagia. Levine-Critchley syndrome: Acanthocytosis Neuroacanthocytosis with neurologic disorders detailed by Edmund Critchley not Macdonald Critchley).