280 INTRODUCTION TO NEUROLOGY 



references to the literature; see also the papers by Goltz, Edinger, 

 and Holmes, cited in the appended Bibliography.) 



Edinger and Fischer report the case of a boy who lived three 

 years and nine months, whose brain when examined after death 

 showed total lack of the cerebral cortex with no other important 

 defects. In this boy there was practically no development in 

 sensory or motor power or in intelligence from birth to the time 

 of his death. The infant fed when put to the breast, but showed 

 no signs of hunger, thirst, or any other sensory process. It lay in 

 a profound stupor and during the first year of life made no 

 spontaneous movements of the limbs. Until the time of death 

 there was little change from this condition, save for continual 

 crying from the second year on. This case shows that the reflex 

 functions of the human brain stem are normally under cortical 

 control to a much greater extent than are those of any of the 

 lower animals, and that the absence of the cortex accordingly 

 involves a more profound disturbance of the subcortical ap- 

 paratus (see p. 129). 



About a hundred years ago Gall and Spurzheim examined the 

 brain, form of skull, and physiognomy of many persons whose 

 mental characteristics were more or less fully known, and 

 reached very definite conclusions regarding the localization 

 within the brain of particular mental faculties, such as benevo- 

 lence, wit, and destructiveness; they claimed, further, that the 

 sizes of these specific parts of the brain (and hence their relative 

 physiological importance) can be determined by study of the 

 external configuration of the skull. Many valuable observations 

 were accumulated by these men and their followers, but the data 

 were so uncritically used and the psychological basis of their 

 generalizations was so faulty that the alleged science of phrenol- 

 ogy which they founded is now wholly discredited and is pro- 

 fessed today only by ignorant charlatans. 



The great popularity of phrenology fifty years and more ago 

 grew out of the fact that it served to give a pseudoscientific 

 character to methods of reading character, and hence of forecast- 

 ing the future formerly claimed by astrologers and necromancers. 

 Modern psychology recognizes that the mind cannot be sub- 

 divided into any such distinct "faculties" as the phrenologists 

 used, and modern neurology finds no basis for the sharply 



