James Watson Kernohan

James Watson Kernohan (1897-1981) was an Irish-American pathologist from County Antrim in Ireland (now Northern Ireland). He studied medicine at Queen’s University, and in 1931 he emigrated to the United States and subsequently worked as a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Kernohan retired from active medicine in 1962.

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Kernohan is remembered for his work in neuropathology, particularly research of spinal cord tumors, brain abscesses and metastatic brain lesions. He is credited with developing a widely used classification system for brain tumors. The eponymous Kernohan's notch is named after him, which is a groove in the cerebral peduncle caused by displacement of the brainstem against the incisura of the tentorium cerebelli in some cases of transtentorial herniation.

In 1952 he published an atlas of tumor pathology titled Tumors of the Central Nervous System, and with Mayo neurologist Alfred Uihlein (1908-1990) he published Sarcomas of the Brain.

References

• European Neurology; Kernohan's Notch J.M.S.Pearce