Dual character of the brain / By C.E. Brown-Séquard.

  • Brown-Séquard, Charles-Edouard, 1817-1894.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dual character of the brain / By C.E. Brown-Séquard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the loss of voluntary movement on the opposite side. But that is not what we find. We see tliat the lesion which has destroyed one-half of the l^rain mfxy allow voluntary movement, wiiile a lesion which is not larger than a pea in any one part of the brain can produce a loss of voluntary movement. Therefore we are to admit that when the paralysis of movement comes in connection with disease of one-half of the brain, it depends on an influence starting from the place where the disease is acting \ipon remote parts so as to produce a cessation of activity there, or in other words a paralysis. The same reasoning may be applied in regard to perception of sensation. Here also we find the same thing. I shall, there- fore, not dwell on that point. We know a thousand cases of disease occupying one-half of the brain that has not produced the slightest alteration in the power of feeling. But, if it is so, it remains to be explained how it is, that the two halves of the brain come to be in some respects different, and that the phj^- siological and pathological study of the two halves of the brain indicates great differences in this respect. If we pass in review what is known, we find very great differences indeed. Tliese dif- ferences depend on the fact that, through the fault of our fathers and mothers, the faults that weigh upon us, and have led us to make use of only one-half of our body for certain acts, and one- half of our brain for certain other acts also—we find tliat it is owing to that defect in our education that one-half of our brain is developed for certain things, while the other half of the brain is developed for other things. As regards what belongs to the left side of the brain compared with the right side of the brain, allow me to say the most important feature in its physiology' or pathology is what a French physician has discovered. It is, as I have said already, that to that side of the brain belongs the faculty of expressing ideas by speech Besides that mental faculty of speech, the left side of tlie brain possesses, in a much more marked degree than the right, the power of moving the