When James Parkinson wrote An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he had already started to reduce his medical practice and hand it over to his son John William Keys Parkinson, also a surgeon, in the hopeful expectation that he would be able to devote more time to his passion for geology and fossil collecting. 6 years later, at the age of 68, James Parkinson moved from his London home at Hoxton Square to 3 Pleasant Row with his wife and their unmarried daughter, Mary. Less than a year after his move, on a Sunday afternoon on December 19, 1824, he had a stroke.