Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Over the teacups / by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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![The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from the letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of your correspondent. The distance at which the action took place [the let- ter was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was sitting] shows this charge to have been of notable intensity. Brain action through space without material sym- bolism, such as speech, expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far off from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can be stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid. Your incident is a typical example of cerebral in- duction from a source containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in my dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to elec- tricity. Think how long it was before we had at- tained any real conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural that cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before long to be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric telegraph and the slaving 4 dynamo.' What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cere- bricity fastening itself on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling about in mail-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21019708_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
