Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain by Anne Harrington

Author:Anne Harrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

2 I am indebted to Carlos Alvarado’s 1986 paper “Early speculations about psychic phenomena and the brain’s hemispheres’ for bringing this aspect of Lombroso’s thinking to my attention and guiding me to the relevant primary sources.

3 Bleuler’s report also has at least a surface resemblance to a case of hysteria described in 1889 by William James. This case seemed too provocative not to be slipped into this study somewhere, even though James, rightly perhaps, did not explicitly interpret it in terms of the functional duality of the brain. The patient in question, a young American woman by the name of Anna Winsor, began at the age of nineteen to succumb to periodic spells of apparent unilateral delirium, tearing at her bedclothes and hair with her left hand, while the right hand tried to stop her from doing violence to herself by seizing the left hand and holding it still. It was not long before the patient—or, at any rate, the speaking consciousness—failed to recognize her right arm as her own but regarded it as a foreign object, “Old Stump” she called it, with its own intelligence. According to James, “When her delirium is at its height, as well as at all other times, her right hand is rational, asking and answering questions in writing; giving directions; trying to prevent her tearing her clothes; when she pulls out her hair it seizes and holds her left hand. When she is asleep, it carries on conversation the same; writes poetry; never sleeps; acts the part of a nurse as far as it can; pulls the bedclothes over the patient if it can reach them, when uncovered; raps on the head-board to awaken her mother (who always sleeps in the same room) if anything occurs, as spasms, etc.” (James 1889, 553).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.