Born in
New Zealand, he studied at the
University of Otago at
Dunedin,
South Island, where he qualified in medicine in 1924. He then took up a fellowship to perform research at the department of Dr Sir
Charles Scott Sherrington, where he studied
motor neuron physiology. He obtained a
DPhil and published sixteen scientific papers on his research. In 1928 he took up a clinical post at the
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and over the subsequent years underwent neurological specialist training, as well as serving as a lecturer, at the National Hospital and
Guy's Hospital. The National Hospital was at the forefront of the developing specialty of neurology, and he was influenced by some of the senior staff such as
Gordon Holmes,
Charles Symonds and
Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson. and promoted
captain a year later. He was appointed as a neurologist at
St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1935. He spent 1936 in
Baltimore at
Yale University performing research with former Oxford colleague John Fulton, then returned to London to work at the National Hospital. He married Sylvia Summerhayes in 1937; they were to have four sons. Denny-Brown was offered the professorship of neurology at
Harvard Medical School in 1939, but the
Second World War intervened, he was placed back on the active list on 9 October 1939 as the British mobilisation intensified. The next two years he worked in Oxford, and only after direct pressure on
Winston Churchill by Harvard president
James Conant was his mobilisation cancelled, and he was able to accept the offer at Harvard, where he started work in 1941, as well as assuming the directorship of neurology at
Boston City Hospital. From 1945 to 1946 he was called again by the British army to direct the neurology services of the RAMC in
India and
Burma, with the local rank of
brigadier, but he finally left the RAMC in 1950, and was granted the honorary rank of
major. He became a US citizen in 1952, and in Boston he did clinical work, teaching and training of residents, and physiological research. He was president of the
American Neurological Association between 1959 and 1960, and brought it closer to the more recently established
American Academy of Neurology. After his retirement in 1967 he continued basic research, mainly on the
peripheral nervous system, in Boston. From 1972 until his death from
multiple myeloma in 1981 he was scholar in residence at the
National Institutes of Health. ==Works==