quence of paralysis; sometimes a singular transposition of letters is the only abnormal sign noticed. Dr. Winslow, for instance, mentions the case of a gentleman who invariably reversed their order; for instance, he always said puc for cup, and gum for mug.
Sudden concussions of the brain arising from external injury sometimes produce a total loss of consciousness for a greater or lesser space of time. It is observable, however, that upon recovery the mind immediately recurs to the last action or thought it was employed upon before its powers were suspended, and endeavours to continue its action. A little girl, engaged in play with some companion, happened to fall and injure her head whilst catching a toy that was thrown to her. For ten hours she was totally unconscious; upon opening her eyes, however, she immediately jumped to the side of the bed, and assuming the action of catching, exclaimed, “Where is it? where did you throw it?” A more singular instance still of the manner in which the brain will catch up and continue its last train of thought, even after a considerable lapse of time, is the following:—A British captain, whilst giving orders on the quarter-deck of his ship at the Battle of the Nile, was struck on the head by a shot, and immediately became senseless. He was taken home, and removed to Greenwich Hospital, where for fifteen months he evinced no sign of intelligence. He was then trephined; and immediately upon the operation being performed, consciousness returned, and he immediately began busying himself to see the orders carried out that he had given during the battle fifteen months previously. The clockwork of the brain, unaware that it had stopped, upon being set going again, pointed to the exact minute at which it had left off. These sudden revivals of a lost intelligence almost rival in their dramatic effect the effect of the Prince’s advent in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, where at the magic of a kiss, the inmates of the Royal Household, who had gone to sleep for a hundred years transfixed in their old attitudes, leapt suddenly into life and motion, as though they had only for a moment slept:—
The hedge broke in, the banner flew,
The butler drank, the steward scrawl’d,
The fire shot up, the marten flew,
The parrot scream’d, the peacock squall’d,
The maid and page renewed their strife,
The palace bang’d and buzz’d and clackt,
And all the long-pent stream of life
Dash’d downward in a cataract.
So, true is it that all fiction must be founded upon fact, and the strongest vagaries of the romancer can always be matched by the calm experience of the philosopher.
But in the remarkable examples of sudden loss of memory we have instanced, recovery has either slowly followed through the operations of nature or through some surgical operation; but there are not wanting cases to prove that the merest mechanical agencies have been sufficient to restore it. To these cases we might almost quote the old medical aphorism, “Similia similibus curantur,” to wit, a man, in consequence of a severe blow upon the head, suffers from a paralysis of the memory; he falls from a window, a concussion of the brain follows, and, the result is, a restoration of his memory to its original strength! Nay, in cases where not only the memory has been impaired, but all the other faculties of the brain also, where idiotcy, in fact, has existed, a sudden injury to the head has been known to shake the brain into a healthy condition. In such cases it would appear that the injury to the brain must have been brought about by a slight mechanical derangement of some part of its structure; in the same manner, a clock that suddenly stops without apparent cause may be made to go on again by giving it a gentle strike. We have only quoted a few of the many extraordinary examples from the chapter on Disordered Memory in Dr. Winslow’s work, which, although a scientific and practical treatise on the incipient symptoms of the diseases of the brain and disorders of the mind (useful as a text-book for the medical profession), is charming as a modern romance. These illustrations, we think, tend to prove that the doctrine he espouses, of the indestructibility of mental impressions, may be sound, and that, starting from this point, the path is laid for important future discoveries in one of the most extraordinary sections of psychological inquiry.
A. W.
THE MONTHS.
SEPTEMBER.
