Several facts have come out concerning the results of Pro-
fessor Ferrier's experiments on the monkeys' brains, so much vaunted by the Times of Tuesday week as having led to the exact localisation of the tumour in a paralytic patient's brain. And all these new facts tend to discredit the value attached to these experiments. In the first place the patient on whom the operation was performed has not recovered but died from the effects of the operation. In the next place, competent authorities tell us that far better guidance is to be found for the localisation of brain tumours, in the history of clinical cases followed by post-mortem examinations of the brain, than in any or all of Professor Ferrier's experiments. Dr. Macewen, of Glasgow, we learn, following this guidance, has discovered and removed tumours in the brain in several recent cases with the best results. In the third place,—and this, we think, the most im- portant point of all,—far from its being true that Professor Ferrier's experiments were not cruel, they appear to have been very cruel, though performed at first under complete anaesthetics, the twenty monkeys operated on having been transformed from gay, intelligent, affectionate, creatures, into miserable sufferers, robbed by one operation after another of all evidence of mental capacity, sitting in abject melancholy while they lived, with hands clasped on their heads, and generally dying of meningitis, in the dreadful distress which always attends that disease.
Previous page
