Page:Recovery from the passage of an iron bar through the head.djvu/16

16 injury. These convulsions were unquestionably epileptic. It is regretted that an autopsy could not have been had, so that the precise condition of the encephalon at the time of his death might have been known. In consideration of this important omission, the mother and friends, waiving the claims of personal and private affection, with a magnanimity more than praiseworthy, at my request have cheerfully placed this skull (which I now show you) in my hands, for the benefit of science.

I desire, here, to express gratefully my obligations, and those of the Profession, to D. D. Shattuck, Esq., brother-in-law of the deceased; to Dr. Coon, Mayor of San Francisco, and to Dr. J. D. B. Stillman, for their kind cooperation in executing my plans for obtaining the head and tamping iron, and for their fidelity in personally superintending the opening of the grave and forwarding what we so much desired to see.

The missile entered, as previously stated, immediately anterior and external to the angle of the interior maxillary bone, proceeding obliquely upwards in the line of its axis, passed under the junction of the superior maxillary and malar bones, comminuting the posterior wall of the antrum, entered the base of the skull at a point, the centre of which is one and one-fourth inches to the left of the median line, in the junction of the lesser wing of the sphenoid with the orbitar process of the frontal bone–comminuting and removing the entire lesser wing, with one-half of the greater wing of the sphenoid bone–also fracturing and carrying away a large portion of the orbitar process of the frontal bone, leaving an opening in the base of the cranium, after the natural efforts at repair by the deposit of new bone, of one inch in its lateral, by two inches in its antero-posterior