Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/505

Rh brain-substance itself is utterly non-sensitive, as every hospital-surgeon can tell us. Persons may actually recover from serious injuries of the brain in which several ounces of brain-substance may have been lost, and recover with good effect, and in many cases without any perceptible alteration of their mental peculiarity. The most notorious case of this kind is known as "the American crow-bar case." A bar of iron accidentally shot off from a blast passed through the top of a young man's head at the left side of the forehead, having traversed the front part of the left hemisphere or side of the brain. The iron bar measured three feet in length, and weighed fourteen pounds. After the accident he felt no pain, and was able to walk without help in a few hours' time. The man made a good recovery, and for twelve years made a livelihood by exhibiting himself in the United States, his skull being now preserved in the museum of Harvard University. This patient undoubtedly lost a relatively large portion of his brain-substance. At one fell swoop there must have been a considerable destruction of phrenological organs. Yet he suffered from no deprivation of intelligence; and few would dream of associating the drinking habits which finally beset him with his accident and with his loss of brains, or otherwise maintain that he was less rational before than after the accident. Thus the misfortunes of existence and the experimentation of the physiologist positively contradict the old phrenology, and assert that localization of function does exist, it is true, but that the "organs" of the phrenologist are mere theoretical nonentities, without a trace of substance to insure their stability or real nature.

What amount of localization, then, can be safely assumed to exist in the human brain as revealed by recent experimentation? It may be known to the generality of readers that the movements, acts, and probably ideas relating to one side of the body are regulated by the opposite side or hemisphere of the brain. Thus, convulsions affecting one side of the body were shown by Dr. Hughlings Jackson to be caused by disease of the opposite side, and the idea of the duality of the brain's action followed in a natural sequence on the observation of facts like the preceding. Thus, as a general rule, it may be affirmed that brain-disease itself, or the ideas of natural existence, are so far localized that their perfect effects are only visible and appreciated when the same parts in both halves or hemispheres of the brain are affected. To illustrate what the new phrenology has to say regarding the localization of the brain-functions, let us inquire what is known regarding the exceedingly curious condition known as "aphasia." Persons affected with this lesion understand perfectly what is said to them, but they are absolutely speechless, and can not utter a single word. Now, it is a perfectly well-ascertained fact that aphasia is associated with disease of the front part of the left half or hemisphere of the brain—a part which may therefore be called the "speech-center." The curious fact must thus be emphasized that aphasia is invariably associated with disease