James Parkinson FGS (11 April 175521 December 1824) was an English surgeon, apothecary, geologist, palaeontologist, and political activist. He is most famous for his 1817 work, An Essay on the Shaking Palsy in which he was the first to describe "paralysis agitans", a condition that would later be renamed Parkinson's disease by Jean-Martin Charcot.