The surgical treatment of idiocy / by G.E. Shuttleworth.

  • Shuttleworth, G. E. (George Edward), 1842-1928.
Date:
[1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The surgical treatment of idiocy / by G.E. Shuttleworth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    9 small idiot skulls, and states that he finds nothing to uggest that deficiency in the development of the skull was he leading feature in the deformity, or that the smallness f the bony cerebral envelope exerted a compressing or warfing influence upon the brain (see “ Lancet,” Feb. 16, 895, p. 425). In the case of a typical microcephalic idiot jrmerly under my care at the Royal Albert Asylum, who ied aged 29, there was not, according to Prof. Cunningham, f Dublin, complete ossification of sutures; and in this and a several other cases of microcephalus which have been horouglily investigated, the convolutions of the brain, such s they are, give no indication of compression, but are free, ut-standing, and separated by well-marked sulci. To cut hinks in the skull, therefore, with the view of promoting rain development is, in the majority of cases of micro- ephalus, much as if an anxious mother were to try to mprove the growth of a stunted undersized boy by cutting oles in his clothes ! The advocates of craniectomy have indeed abandoned the beery of premature synostosis as the rationale of the peration, and now allege, so far as I understand them, hat the operation excites a sort of “ alterative ” effect lpon the brain, promoting “ conflux ” of blood, and increas- ng cerebral pulsation. Keen, of Philadelphia, said in the ourse of an address to the medical officers of American nstitutions for Feeble-minded Children, that “When we are an expanding brain and a resisting skull of about qual and reciprocal force, we have the normal condition in hildren; but if we have feeble children with poorly ourished and feebly-growing brains, in the majority of ases the feebly-growing brain cannot overcome the resist- rice that the normal brain can.” Probably some analogous irgument was used by the practitioners of trepanning in re-historic times, for the Baron de Baye has found in the halk of the Marne sepulchres containing numerous skulls rnamented with elliptical openings, probably made by aeans of a flint scraper during childhood. History, un- ortunately, is silent as to the degree of brain illumination o which the men of the polished stone age attained in con- squence of this peculiar mode of letting in daylight brough their skulls ! We can, however, criticise the modern revival of infantile trepanning in view of results recorded during recent years. n 1891, being anxious to form an opinion on the subject, I