Medicine: Concertmaster

At the base of the brain, just above the brain stem, is a small patch of grey matter. Only one three-hundredth part of the total brain, the hypothalamus is concertmaster in the symphony of human behavior. Last week, in Manhattan, noted neurologists and psychiatrists from all sections of the U. S. met at the 20th annual convention of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease. For two days they did nothing but discuss, in the light of latest research, the orchestral effects of the hypothalamus, and pay tribute to the pioneer work of Chicago Neurologist Stephen Walter Ranson, who presented his first outstanding paper in 1904, is still continuing his explorations.

Climax of the 30-odd scientific papers was a poetic paean to the hypothalamus, presented by famed Cornell Neurologist Foster Kennedy. Said he: “

The supreme mystery lies in commonplace phenomena, so exquisitely maintained that they excite almost no attention. The regularity of the rhythm of breathing, the constancy of pulse rate, the exact maintenance of body temperature, the beautiful balance of the intake and output of fluid, the cycle of sleep, the integrity of body weight, and the imposed periodicity of the menstrual rhythm—all these ebbs and flows are instrumented primarily through the [hypothalamus].”

Some particulars he offered:

> A diseased hypothalamus may not only cause manic-depressive psychoses (alternating fits of madness and despair) but also less common episodes of insanity. One 20-year-old patient, with a diseased hypothalamus, “sometimes on laughing . . . experiences a sensation of darkness coming from the back to the front of the head, followed by a sudden falling. . . . She also has periods of enforced immobilization during which she can’t lift a hand by will, nor move a foot, nor speak. Emotion, triggering morbid sleep, put one of my patients in an impossible position when he suddenly slept with snores on kissing a girl in a taxicab.”