Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 1).djvu/444

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BROWN-SEQUARD
BROWN-SEQUARD

but all efforts to make hiin haul it down were unsuccessful. His paper was finally suppressed by the confederate authorities, and in the last issue, that of 24 Oct., 1861, he published a farewell address to his readers, in which he said that he preferred imprisonment to submission. Refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the confederate government, he was at last persuaded by his friends to leave Knoxville for another district. During his absence he was accused of burning railway bridges in east Tennessee, and a company of troops was sent out with orders to shoot him on sight; but he escaped by secreting himself among the loyalists on the North Carolina border. He was finally induced, by the promise of a free pass to Kentucky, to return to Knoxville, but was arrested there, 6 Dec, 1861, on charge of treason, and thrown into jail, where he was confined without fire, and suffered much during his imprisonment. He was released at the close of the month, but was detained at his own house under guard. Hearing that Judah P. Benjamin had called him a "dangerous man," and had wished him out of the confederacy, Brownlow wrote him a characteristic letter, in which occur the words, "Just give me my passport, and I will do more for your confederacy than the devil has ever done—I will leave the country." Benjamin advised his release, to relieve the government from the odium of having entrapped him. Brownlow was taken at his word, and sent inside the union lines at Nashville, on 3 March, 1862. After this he made a tour through the northern states, speaking to immense audiences in the principal cities, and at Philadelphia was joined by his family, who had also been expelled from Knoxville. He returned to Tennessee in 1864, and, on the reconstruction of the state in 1865, was elected governor, serving two terms. In his message of October, 1865, he advocated the removal of the negro population to a separate territory, and declared it bad policy to give them the ballot. In that of November, 1866, he reiterated these sentiments, but recognized the fact that the blacks had shown greater aptitude for learning than had been expected, and, although confessing to " caste prejudice." said he desired to act in harmony with the great body of loyal people throughout the union. In 1867 Gov. Brownlow came into conflict with Mayor Brown, of Nashville, over the manner of appointing judges of election under the new franchise law. The U. S. troops were ordered to sustain the governor, and the city authorities finally submitted. During the ku-klux troubles Gov. Brownlow found it necessary to proclaim martial law in nine counties of the state. In 1869 he was elected to the U. S. senate, and resigned the office of governor. In 1875 he was succeeded in the senate by ex-President Johnson. After the close of his term he returned to Knoxville, bought a controlling interest in the "Whig," which he had sold in 1869, and edited it until his death. He published "The Iron Wheel Examined, and its False Spokes Extracted," a reply to attacks on the Methodist church (Nashville, 1856); "Ought American Slavery to be Perpetuated?" a debate with Rev. A. Prynne, of New York, in which Mr. Brownlow took the affirmative (Philadelphia, 1858); and "Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession, with a Narrative of Personal Adventures among the Rebels" (1862).


BROWN-SEQUARD, Charles Éduard, physiologist, b. in the island of Mauritius, 8 April, 1817; d. in Paris, Prance. 2 April, 1894. Ilis father was a sea-captain, whose vessel was lost in an attempt to convey provisions to Mauritius during a famine, and who married a French lady on the island named Sequard. Their son was carefully educated in Mauritius and sent to Paris to complete his studies. He took the degree of bachelor of letters in 1838, that of bachelor of science in 1839, and, pursuing his studies in the school of medicine, received the degree of M. D. in 1846. He devoted himself, after acquiring his profession, to physiological experiments, and made important discoveries. Five prizes were awarded him by the French academy of sciences, and twice he received the queen's grant for the encouragement of science from the British royal society. By the transfusion of defibrinated blood he produced results tending to show that the fibrin in the blood has no value in nutrition, but is an excrementitious prod- uct. He discovered that defibrinated and oxygenated blood will restore the irritability of the muscles after a corpse has become rigid; that the blood returns through the veins as venous blood, containing fibrin; and that by injecting it repeatedly into the arteries, after defibrinating and oxygenating it each time, the irritability of the muscles can be maintained for hours. His experiments led him to the conclusion that arterial blood alone is subservient to nutrition, but that venous blood is necessary to produce contractions of the muscles. He conducted a series of experiments on animal heat, by which he fixed the temperature of the human body at 103°—several degrees higher than previous investigators. He found that, in the case of poisons that cause a diminution of temperature, the toxic action can be counteracted to a considerable extent by artificially maintaining the heat of the body. His experiments on the spinal cord led him to the conclusion that the fibres of the posterior or sensory columns of the cord do not connect directly with the brain, but convey impressions to the gray matter of the cord, which transmits them to the brain, and that the fibres intersect within the gray matter, near the point where they enter, and not in the cerebrum or medulla oblongata. The decussation of the motor fibres, those of the anterior column of the spinal cord, he found, on the other hand, is in the medulla oblongata. He experimented likewise on the muscles, on the sympathetic system of nerves and ganglions, and on the effect of the removal of the supra-renal capsules. In May, 1858, he delivered a series of lectures on the nervous system before the royal college of physicians and surgeons in London. In 1864 he was appointed professor of the physiology and pathology of the nervous system at Harvard, and took up his residence in the United States. He held the professorship for four years, and in 1869 returned to France, and was appointed professor of experimental and comparative pathology in the school of medicine in Paris, which chair he held till 1871. In 1858 he established in Paris the "Journal de la physiologie de l'homme et des animaux," which he conducted till 1863. After his return to France in 1869 he founded another journal, called "Archives de la physiologie normale et pathologique." In 1873 he became a practitioner in New York city. In association with Dr. E. C. Seguin he began in that city the publication of a medical journal entitled "Archives of Scientific and Practical Medicine." Eventually he returned to Paris, and on 3 Aug., 1878, succeeded Claude Bernard in the chair of experimental medicine in the College of France. The same year he was elected to the chair of medicine in the French academy of sciences. His services were in constant demand as a consulting physician in diseases of the nervous system, to which special branch he had confined his practice. He had been remark-