Nerve Congress

A prideful lot were the nerve specialists who met in London last week for an International Neurological Congress. To them, the brain, cathedral of human intelligence, is no more than 2 1/2 lb. of raw meat, the cerebrospinal nervous system, conveyor of human will to muscles, a set of puppeteer's strings; the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, a network of complex paths, lanes, byways and highways through which the human soul moves strangely. To know the complexities of the neural ways and cords and of the cerebral mass requires a chess player's intricate mentality. To dare to touch them with a knife requires unpassionate fingers.

Such fingers has McGill University's handsome Dr. Wilder Graves Penfield who told the International Neurological Congress how he opened the skulls of 75 epileptics, removed the scars and abscesses he found on their brains. A large number of the 75 were improved, remarked Dr. Penfield, and a few were cured.

From handsome Dr. Max Minor Peet of the Universityof Michigan, the Congressmen heard of cutting abdominal nerves which stimulate the kidneys, adrenals, spleen, pancreas, liver, stomach and intestines, of cutting dorsal sympathetic nerves which affect the colon, rectum, bladder and genital organs. Dr. Peet operated thus on 60 patients to relieve their high blood pressure. Results:

85% improvement, varying from the relief of headache to apparent complete cure; 10% not benefited. About 15% seemed to be cured."

Handsome Dr. Richard Max Brickner of Manhattan took out both frontal lobes of a man's tumorous brain, a unique case, said he. Together with the excised pieces of his brain the patient lost his memory and, reported Dr. Brickner, "control over his emotional drives, presumably because he had lost the knowledge that there was a social gain in such control. In this respect, he was like a child who has not yet learned that there is a world in which it is necessary to meet people and situations and become adapted to them."

The operations which Drs. Brickner, Peet and Penneld described in London last week are evidences of a growing emphasis among doctors. Where physicians cannot cure with drugs, psychiatrists with suggestions, manipulators with physical therapy, surgeons with excisions, nerve specialists are daring to meddle by disconnecting parts of the body's signal system. Along this line is the work of the Mayo Clinic's handsome senior brain surgeon. Dr. Alfred Washington Adson. Dr. Adson told the London Congress the technique, which he worked out with a Mayo associate, Dr. George Elgie Brown, of stopping Raynaud's Disease. This is a disease to which neurotic young women are peculiarly susceptible. After exposure to cold, shock or insult, their fingers or toes turn white, feel icy, grow numb, hurt. Attacks last from a few minutes to an hour. After many attacks the fingers or toes decay, may drop off. Sometimes the tip of the nose, the ears, parts of the lip rot away.

Immediate cause of Raynaud's Disease is a nervous spasm of the arteries which feed fingers, toes, nose, ears, lips. While the arteries pucker, blood cannot get through. For lack of blood the tissues faint, fret, die. Although the cause of the abnormal construction of the blood vessels has not been settled, Dr. Adson gets results by cutting the sympathetic nerves over which pass the fugitive signals that pucker the arteries. He believes that the real trouble lies somewhere in the brains of the neurotic young women who develop Raynaud's Disease.

At Cumberland, Md., Mrs. Vernice Higgins Stolter, 12, last week gave birth to a 6-lb. boy.

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