John Cheyne's classic monographs.

Abstract John Cheyne (1777–1836), a Scotsman born in Leith, graduated at Edinburgh University but spent most of his career in Dublin. He was professor of medicine (1813–19) at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, physician to the House of Industry Hospitals and co‐founder of the Dublin Hospital Reports in which his celebrated account of a patient with irregular breathing was described in 1818. His Essay on hydrocephalus acutus (1808) and Cases of apoplexy and lethargy (1812), important nineteenth‐century contributions to neuropathology are considered here in detail. Towards the end of his life he was afflicted by depression and his posthumously‐published Essays on the partial derangement of the mind (1843) was written as a therapeutic exercise.