Phrenology, or the doctrine of the mind : and of the relations between its manifestations and the body.
- Johann Spurzheim
- Date:
- 1825
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Phrenology, or the doctrine of the mind : and of the relations between its manifestations and the body. Source: Wellcome Collection.
61/352 page 45
![the water is limpid; but if they have been carried from place to place, and rudely handled, it is not astonishing that the water should become turbid, and the brain present some¬ thing of a dissolved or eroded appearance. We establish our assertions also by physiology. If the brain be the organ of the mind, and be destroyed in hydro¬ cephalic persons, they must necessarily be incapable of mani¬ festing any mental faculty. One or other of the two fol¬ lowing opinions must be entertained: either the brain is the organ of the soul, and not destroyed in such as, alfected with hydrocephalus, manifest intellectual faculties ; or the brain is not the organ of the soul, because those whose brain is disorga¬ nized exhibit propensities, sentiments, and intellectual faculties. Walter of Berlin, imagining the brain in hydrocephalus to be disorganized, maintained, that in this disease all the intel¬ lectual faculties were annihilated. This however is contrary to fact; there are many instances in which all or most of the faculties were exhibited, although the disease was very con¬ siderable. Tulpius had seen a hydrocephalic person endowed with understanding, and therefore inferred that the structure of the brain must differ from what is commonly supposed. Camper and many other anatomists speak with amazement of similar cases. For the sake of adducing still stronger proofs of the brain’s being exclusively the organ of the soul, and of refuting at the same time those who deny intellectual faculties to the affected with hydrocephalus, I shall here quote several cases in point. l)r. Gall and I observed for some years a woman with con¬ siderable dropsy of the brain, who manifested that share of understanding usually possessed by women of her class. She died at fifty-four years of age of inflammation of the intestinal canal. We found the cavities of the brain containing four pounds of limpid water. We once saw a man of learning, whose skull was much larger than natural, particularly in the anterior and superioi' ])art of the forehead. To judge from its](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2929597x_0061.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
