Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / By Amariah Brigham.

  • Brigham, Amariah, 1798-1849.
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / By Amariah Brigham. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/98 (page 17)
    Kiclierancl mentions the case of a woman whose brain was exposed, in consequence of the removal of a consi¬ derable portion of its bony covering- by disease. He says he repeatedly made pressure on the brain, and each time suspended all feeling and all intellect, which were instantly restored when the pressure was withdrawn. The same writer also relates another case, that of a man who had been trepanned, and who perceived his intellectual facul¬ ties failing, and his existence apparently drawing to a close, every time the elFused blood collected upon the brain so as to produce pressure.* Professor Chapman of Philadelphia, mentions in his Lectures, that he saw au individual with his skull perforated and the brain exposed, who was accustomed to submit himself to the same ex¬ periment of pressure as the above, and who was exhibited by the late Professor Westar to his class. His intellect and moral faculties disappeared, on the application of pressure to the brain : they were held under the thumb, as it were, and restored at pleasure to their full activity by discontinuing the pressure.'!' But the most extraordinary case of this kind within my knowledge, and one peculiarly interesting to the physiologist and metaphysician, is related by Sir Astiey Cooper in his Surgical Lectures. A man, of the name of Jones, received an injury of his head, while on board a vessel in the Mediterranean, which rendered him insensible. The vessel, soon after this accident, made Gibraltar, where Jones was placed in the hospital, and remained several months in the same insensible state. He was then carried on board the Dolphin frigate to Deptford, and from thence was sent to St Thomas’s Hospital, London. He lay constantly on his back, and breathed with difficulty. His pulse was regular, and each time it beat, he moved his fingers. When hungry or thirsty, he moved his lips and tongue. Mr Cline, the surgeon, found a portion of the skull depressed, trepanned him, and removed the depressed portion. Immediately after this operation, the motion of his fingers ceased, and at 4 o’clock in the afternoon (the operation having been performed at one,) he sat up in bed ; sensation and volition returned, and in four days he got out of bed and conversed. The last thing he re¬ membered, was the circumstance of taking a prize in the * Rlcherand’s Elements of Physiology. Principles of Medicine, by Samuel Jackson, M.D.