This article addresses the discrepancy between Edouard Hitzig\'s and David Ferrier\'s findings on the cortical localization of movements in animals and Jean-Martin Charcot\'s findings in humans. The results of Hitzig\'s and Ferrier\'s vivisections were criticized by experimentalists in England and France as discordant, irreproducible, and inconclusive, and they were rejected by clinicians as irrelevant. Charcot addressed the gap between animal and human motor function by correlating motor deficits and focal epileptic seizures in patients to their autopsy findings. By this method he discovered the functional organization of the human motor cortex and produced the first accurate human motor brain map. Ferrier, William Osler, and Hughlings Jackson acknowledged Charcot\'s findings, and his findings guided the first neurosurgeons in localizing and resecting intracranial mass lesions presenting with focal epileptic seizures. Although his contributions in these fields have been neglected by modern historians, Charcot made significant contributions to the neurobiology of the human motor system, to epileptology, and to the birth of modern neurosurgery.

Neurosurgery is predicated on the knowledge of the structure-function relationship of the brain. When the topic is broached in its historiography, it begins with Fritch and Hitzig\'s report on the localization of motor function in the cortex of the dog and skips rapidly to Wilder Penfield\'s homunculus. In that gap are found the origins of modern neurosurgery in 3 papers published by Jean-Martin Charcot and Albert Pitres between 1877 and 1879 in which they describe the somatotopic organization of the human motor cortex and draw the first human brain map. Their findings, obtained through the clinicopathological method, gave relevance to David Ferrier\'s observations in animals. Their work was extensively cited, and their illustrations reproduced by Ferrier in his landmark lecture to the Royal College of Physicians in 1878. It was known to William Macewen, who used localization to guide him in resecting intracranial mass lesions, and to William Osler and John Hughlings Jackson, who were early advocates of intracranial surgery. This paper describes Charcot and Pitres\' discovery of the cortical origin of human voluntary movement and its somatotopic organization, and their influence on 19th-century intracranial surgery. It fills a gap in the historiography of cerebral localization and neurosurgery.

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