Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/645

Rh mind. Surgeons are agreed, however, that, for the purposes of talking, the more there is left of the "unruly member" the better.

But, even after total extirpation of the tongue, persons have been known to retain the faculty of speech without serious impairment. A case of this character is related by Roland, surgeon to the French court in 1630. It is that of a boy who lost his tongue, when six years old, from gangrene, the result of an attack of small-pox. At the time he came under observation, three years later, all that remained of the organ was a slight, double prominence, flattened and attached to the floor of the mouth, extending from the inside of the chin to the oval aperture of the throat. This was composed of muscular tissue, divided by a line, and was like two little muscles, with a furrow between them. When it was pressed, or when the child spoke or swallowed, it swelled, gathered itself up, and retracted from side to side toward its middle, or from one side of the mouth to the other, like two leeches joined together. Roland believed these small bodies to be the remains of some of the muscles ordinarily employed in the movements of the tongue. This child's mouth was anomalous in other respects. The palate was considerably flattened, and the teeth were in a double row, the outer row being the milk-teeth, which had not been shed, and the inner row the permanent teeth, which had come up behind, and pointed inward. Both these conditions the French surgeon attributed to the absence of the tongue, which, by its upward pressure, tends to produce the concavity of the palate, and, by its forward pressure, to force the teeth into a vertical position. The entrance to the pharynx was of an oval shape, and unusually small. The uvula was long and thin, descending almost to the epiglottis, and the tonsils were as large as chestnuts. Notwithstanding the almost complete absence of any thing answering to a tongue, and the additional defects enumerated, the child was able to speak intelligibly. Bonami and Aurran have recorded similar cases in the "Memoirs of the French Academy of Chirurgery."

A still more remarkable example of the retention of the powers of utterance, after loss of the tongue, is that of Margaret Cutting, whose case was brought before the Royal Society of England in 1742, and again in 1747. This girl lost her tongue by what was supposed to be a cancer, when four years old. The disease first appeared in the shape of a small black speck on the upper surface of the tongue, and rapidly eat its way quite back to the root. One day, while the surgeon who had the case in charge was syringing the parts, the tongue dropped out, the girl immediately thereafter, to the great astonishment of those present, saying to her mother: "Don't be frightened, mamma; it will grow again." Three months afterward it was completely healed, with not a vestige of the tongue remaining. At the age of twenty this girl was carefully examined by several competent gentlemen, who report in the 44th volume of the "Philosophical Transactions" as follows, regarding her condition: "We proceeded to examine her mouth