184 SECTIONAL^ADDRESSES. 



In 1903, the year after his return from the Todas, and the year 

 of his election to a Fellowship at St. John's College, Elvers began an 

 investigation, continued for five years, with Dr. Henry Head, in which 

 the latter, certain sensory nerves of whose arm had been experimentally 

 divided, acted as subject, and Rivers acted as experimenter, applying 

 various stimuli to the arm and recording the phenomena of returning 

 cutaneous sensibility. The results of this heroic and lengthy investiga- 

 tion are well known. The discovery of a crude punctate protopathic 

 sensibility, distinct from a moi'e refined epicritic sensibility, so deeply 

 impressed Elvers that a decade later his psychological views may be 

 said to have been centred round this distinction between the ungraded, 

 'all-or-nothing,' diffusely locahsing functions of the protopathic system, 

 and the delicately graded, discriminative, accurately localising functions 

 of the epicritic system. The exact interpretation of this ' Human Ex- 

 periment in Nerve Division,' published at length in 1908 {Brain, 

 vol. xxxi., pp. 323-450), has been disputed by subsequent workers, 

 whose divergent lesults, however, are at least partly due to their employ- 

 ment of different methods of procedure. Head's experiment has never 

 been identically repeated, and until this has been done we are probably 

 safe in trusting to the results reached by the imaginative genius and the 

 cautious critical insight of this rare combination of investigators. At & 

 far higher nervous level broad analogies to this peripheral analysis of 

 cutaneous sensibility were later found by Head when thala.mic came 

 to be compared with cortical activity and sensibility. 



While working with Head upon his arm Elvers 's indomitable 

 activity led him to simultaneous occupation in other fields. In 1904 

 he assisted Professor James Ward to found and to edit the British 

 Journal of Psychology, and in that year he also received an invitation 

 to deliver the Croonian Lectures in 1906 at the Eoyal College of Physi- 

 cians, of which in 1899 he had been elected a Fellow. The study of 

 drug effects had long interested him. In a paper on ' Experimental 

 Psychology in Eelation to Insanity,' read before the Medico-Psycho- 

 logical Society in 1895 {Lancet, vol. Ixxiii., p. 867), he had drawn the 

 attention of psychiatrists to the comparability of drug effects with the 

 early stages of mental disorders before they were seen by the physician. 

 A.nd so, reverting to the work he had done under Krapelin many years 

 previously, he chose as his subject for the Croonian Lectures The 

 Influence of Alcohol and other Drugs on Fatigue (Arnold, 1908). But 

 although he utilised Krapelin 's ergograph and many of Krapelin 's 

 methods, Elvers 's flair for discovering previous ' faulty methods of in- 

 vestigation ' and his devotion to scientific methods and accuracy could 

 not fail to advance the subject. Of no one may it be more truly said 

 than of him, — nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He felt instinctively that 

 many of the supposed effects of alcohol were really due to the suggestion, 

 interest, exciteuicnt or sensory stimulation accompanying the taking O'f 

 the drug. Accordingly he disguised the drug, and prepared a control 

 mixture which was indistinguishable- from it. On certain days the 

 drug mixture was taken, on other days the control mixture was taken, 

 the subject never knowing which he was drinking. Elvers engaged 

 Mr. H. N. Webber as a subject who could devote himself to the investi-. 



