Medicine: Spiked Brain

Since last spring when a Berkeley, Calif, surgeon sawed two holes in her skull “to let out the pain,” as she understood the purpose of the operation, Dema Dunlap, 23, a buxom, introspective epileptic, had an irresistible compulsion to finger her scalp where it lay sewn over the trephine holes. The soft spots, yielding under pressure of her finger tips, felt like the germinal depressions of a coconut.

Dr. Erich Kosterlitz had trephined the girl as a last effort to cure her of epilepsy. Sedatives and confinement in an asylum had failed to help her. He concluded that pressure on her brain caused her condition and that he might relieve that pressure by removing pieces of skull over her right temple.

After her operation, Dema Dunlap suffered few epileptic attacks, but more headaches. A week ago her head seemed ready to burst. Fingering her right temple seemed to help. The harder she pressed the better her head felt. An idea developed in her dulled wits. The young woman found a 4-in. spike, 316 in. in diameter. The sharp point of this she pressed into her scalp over a trephine hole. It hurt a little, but it made her feel better. Reaching her left hand over her head, she held the spike in position and with her right fist pounded the spike into her brain as far as it would go, Except for the trifling pain in the scalp she felt nothing, because the tissue of the brain is insensate.

The rest of that day she behaved in her usual introspective way. She went to bed and slept as usual, rose as usual. Next day she casually told her mother what she had done. Her mother drove Dema Dunlap to Dr. Kosterlitz, who refused to believe the young woman’s story until he saw the projecting butt of the spike. He rushed her to a hospital where he extracted the nail. Then she fainted. There was some chance for her recovery, for a person can live with a large part of his brain gone. In Harvard’s anatomical museum is the skull of a man who lived for many years after an explosion drove a crowbar clear through his head. In Louisville lives a woman who had the front lobes of her brain removed on account of an abscess of the brain. In fact, Dr. Kosterlitz was sanguine about his patient. Said he: “If she lives, the shock of the injury may cure her. Such things have happened in epileptic cases.” But removal of the spike permitted a hemorrhage in Dema Dunlap’s brain, from which four days later she died.

Los Angeles last week had a perforated brain almost as bizarre as Berkeley’s. Someone drove a knife into the head of one Frank Hill, Negro, and broke off the handle (see cut). The victim’s skull was so thick that the surgeons could not pull out the blade without wriggling it, and wriggling would tear his brain irreparably. The surgeons therefore sawed the man’s skull around the blade, lifted bone and blade together, expected uneventful recovery.