Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good by Cathy Gere

Author:Cathy Gere [Gere, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-50199-4
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

DAVID FERRIER

Born in Aberdeen in 1843, David Ferrier studied classics and philosophy under Alexander Bain at the University of Aberdeen. It was Bain who introduced the young man to experimental psychology and who sent him to Heidelberg to study under the German pioneers of “psychophysics,” a forerunner of cognitive science. After one year abroad Ferrier came back and completed his medical training in Edinburgh. In 1870 he moved to London and began work as a consultant at the National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy in Queen Square, the first institution to specialize in seizure disorders.51

The year Ferrier arrived at the hospital, the leading clinician, John Hughlings Jackson, a giant of nineteenth-century British neurology, had just made his great theoretical breakthrough. He had realized, on the basis of clinical observation alone, that the “march” of a partial seizure—the way that it would often start in one place, such as the thumb and forefinger, and then progress in an orderly fashion along adjacent parts of the body—was a clue to the way the brain was organized. The very regularity of the progress of a seizure suggested that the human body was “represented” in the cerebral cortex in some invariant fashion. The order in which body parts succumbed to epileptic movement must correspond to the way in which they were represented in the brain. Larger areas of the cortex were devoted to the most functionally complex parts of the body—lips, tongue, hands—which were thus more susceptible to the abnormal electrical discharge causing seizures.52

In 1870 two Prussian experimenters published the results of a series of experiments that seemed to confirm these conjectures about the layout of the cortex. Using an apparatus devised by one of them for administering therapeutic electricity to patients, the pair conducted a series of experiments on stray dogs, opening their skulls and electrically stimulating the surface of their brains to see if they could produce bodily movements.53 With these results they were able to produce the first “map” of the motor area of any species’ brain.

British scientists reacted to the Prussian experiments with a mixture of excitement and panic—excitement that the brain seemed to be yielding its secrets, and panic that the Germans might take credit for being the first to probe the orderly localization of motor function. In 1873 Jackson, Ferrier, and the other rising stars in British neurology gathered for the West Riding Lunatic Asylum’s annual meeting. The discussion turned to the Prussian work on dogs, and Crichton-Browne invited Ferrier to come to the asylum to conduct a series of experiments in the newly built laboratory, replicating the Germans’ results on a much larger scale.54

The project was completed in record time. Using animals provided by Crichton-Browne, Ferrier conducted a series of electrical stimulations on the brains of rabbits, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and birds. In 1873 the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports contained an article summarizing his conclusions, arguing that stimulation of the cortex produced consistent and predictable movements in every animal of the same species.55 This

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