Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/22

10 Not long since Dr. Ferrier, of London, was prosecuted for the alleged performance of certain experiments on the brains of the lower animals. With Fritsch, Hitzig, Goltz, Yeo, and others, he had destroyed or galvanized certain limited areas of the brain (and it must not be forgotten that the brain is wholly without the sense of pain), and so determined the exact nervous centers for certain limited groups of muscles. As a result of their labors, the brain is now mapped out with reasonable accuracy, so that, given certain hitherto ill-understood or obscure localized symptoms, we can now say that there is certainly a tumor, an abscess, or other disease in precisely this or that locality. True, we can doubtfully infer somewhat of the same from the cruel experiments of disease on man. But Nature's experiments are rarely ever limited in area or uncomplicated; they are never systematic and exhaustive; it takes years to collect a fair number of her clumsy experiments, and the knowledge is diffused through many minds instead of being centered in one that will systematize the results.

Said Ferrier, a year ago, in the Marshall Hall oration, "There are already signs that we are within measurable distance of the successful treatment by surgery of some of the most distressing and otherwise hopeless forms of intra-cranial disease, which will vie with the splendid achievements of abdominal surgery."

Note the fulfillment! Last fall, within a year of the foregoing prophecy, a man, aged twenty-five, entered the London Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis. From the symptoms, which I need not detail, Dr. Hughes Bennett, basing his conclusions on Ferrier's experiments, diagnosticated a tumor of small size on the surface of the brain, involving the center of motion for the muscles of the hand. On November 15, 1884, at his instance, Mr. Godlee trephined the skull over the selected spot, and a quarter of an inch below the surface of the brain found a tumor as big as a walnut, and removed it. For three weeks the man did well, but died on the twenty-eighth day from blood-poisoning, such as might follow any operation, especially a new one. Macewen, of Glasgow, has similarly trephined a woman, the victim of slow paralysis of body and mind, and opened an abscess a little distance below the surface, letting out two teaspoonfuls of pus, and followed by entire mental and physical recovery.