Читать книгу Fear - A. Mosso - Страница 25

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One of the greatest experimenters of modern physiology, Flourens, had already given it as his opinion that the whole cerebral mass performs the same functions in all its parts, and that if one portion be taken away, those contiguous to it charge themselves with its offices. This affords a partial explanation of the fact that wounds of the brain are far less dangerous than those of the spinal cord. It is always a great wonder, even to us physiologists, every time we convince ourselves on living subjects that the brain is without feeling. Men have been seen who suffered great portions of their brain, which protruded from the skull, to be cut away, and sick drunkards or madmen, who, through the wounds in their head, seized hold of the brain with their hands and destroyed it.

Only in the last few years have physiologists succeeded in preserving alive for some time dogs of which nearly all the convolutions of the brain had been removed. Professor Goltz brought a dog in this state from Strasburg to London, in order to show the phenomena which an animal then presents, at the International Congress of Medicine. I extract a few fragments from Professor Goltz’s work,[9] in order to give an idea of the phenomena exhibited by dogs when deprived of a great part of their brain.

A brainless dog has a stupid, inane look. One reads idiocy even in his eyes. His movements are slow and uncertain. It seems as though he needed far more time than usual to come to a decision. His gait is like that of a goose, there is something inexpressibly strange and comical in it. The animal always walks straight on like an automaton. If he meets another dog, he steps over him if he is little; if he is big he may lift him with his head, or knock him down, but on he goes. He tries awkwardly to step over every object he meets, although by simply stepping aside he might pass on without hindrance. He only finds his dish of food with difficulty, smell guiding him better than sight; he snaps stupidly at everything he sees, even biting his own paws till he howls with pain. He can no longer find the fragments of bone that fall out of his mouth while chewing.

Dogs like these are no longer capable of learning anything, and one might almost say that they have forgotten what they already knew; for instance, they no longer give their paw to their master, as they used to do. Their whole intellectual life is extinguished; only when they hear a knock at the door do they bark, but they always begin too late. Two dogs that hated each other, bit each other when they met, even after both had lost a great part of their brain. Memory diminishes in proportion as larger quantities of the brain are removed, and disappears wholly when nearly the whole organ is wanting.