Examination of the objections made in Britain against the doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim / by J.G. Spurzheim.

  • Spurzheim, Johann Gaspard, 1776-1832.
Date:
1817
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Examination of the objections made in Britain against the doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim / by J.G. Spurzheim. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the brain, cul-de-sacs, pits, grooves, mountains, wings, lobules, and so on;—who never consider the parts in con- nexion and relation, nay, create artificial separations;— who are attentive only to the mechanical appearances, and never think of the functions of the parts;—who be- lieve, that a man can walk, and have voluntary motion of his legs, without spinal cord, can philosophize without brain;—who can assert, that physiological inquiries of the brain are of no use to the medical profession; who con- sider one brain and its parts as the standard of all other brains; who admit, that the brains of men have their full growth at seven years of age, and do not undergo any change afterwardsand with such Historians, who af- firm from erudite research, and as the result of many experiments, made under a variety of circumstances, that there is no foundation whatever for the supposition, that the convolutions consist of two layers;—who maintain, that numerous unequivocal instances are on record, and are even occurring every day, in which large por- tions of the brain, nay, almost the whole, if not ac- tually the whole of this organ, have been completely destroyed by the progress of hydrocephalus; who hold this to be a fact just as certain as that there are many persons now alive whose legs have been removed by the knife of the surgeon;—and who.at another time prove, that wre are not the first who maintain, that the brain exists in hydrocephalic heads, and that Reil could separate the convolutions in the middle line, after we had shown to him that structure four years before;—who, as author on the brain, did not quote any anatomist to whom the decussation of the pyramids and the communication of the medulla oblongata with the crura cerebri were known; who ascribes the medulla oblongata to the spinal cord, the mass of the pons to the cerebellum, and termi-