Medicine: Psychiatrists at Pittsburgh

In. Pittsburgh last week convening members of the American Psychiatric Association showed their greatest interest in the cases of an almost brainless Pittsburgh matron and a number of imbecile Baltimore maids.

Matron. The principal portion (cerebrum) of the brain consists of a left and a right hemisphere. On their surfaces these hemispheres are colored grey, in their interiors white. Textbooks say that thinking takes place in the grey matter, that the white interior matter merely transmits sensations to the grey cortex and carries instructions from it to the voluntary parts of the body.

In Pittsburgh lives a woman who had the entire right side of her brain removed on account of a tumor, Dr. Stuart N. Rowe of Pittsburgh told his fellow psychiatrists last week. Instead of dying or at least suffering paralysis of her left side, the woman survived and now competently directs a large household. Her memory is not so good as it once was, but she does | not lose the thread of magazine continued stories. All this is most unorthodox according to the hitherto accepted principles of brain physiology. But to Dr. Leland B. Alford of St. Louis, also at the psychiatrists’ meeting, the Pittsburgh woman’s case did not come as much of a surprise.

The loss of large portions of grey and white matter without serious physical impairment has led Dr. Alford to search for a comparatively small “core of intelligence” in the brain. He found it, he told the Association last week, in “a quite small area, lying posteriorly near the base of the brain.” In right-handed individuals this core is located in the left half of the brain; in left-handed ones, in the right hemisphere. Said Dr. Alford: “This area is responsible, when injured, for clouding, confusion and dementia. No other part of the brain, when injured, produces similar impairment of the mental faculties.” According to Dr. Alford’s findings, the fact “that the remainder of the brain may complement, complete and intensify the functions of these basal left-side structures does not alter the fundamental conclusion. Another point is that we may have been searching all these years in the wrong spots for the anatomical changes of mental disease, such as epilepsy and similar disorders.”

Maids. Psychiatrist Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins reported on the results of a cruel traffic in imbecile girls which flourished in Baltimore 15 years ago. Employers looking for cheap household help had connived with crooked lawyers and judges to release girls, both white and Negro, from Baltimore’s asylums for the feeble-minded on habeas corpus writs. Once the employers had the girls, they worked them as maids for little or no pay, threw them on the street when unsatisfied with their dull-witted work.

In subsequent years, Dr. Kanner told the psychiatrists last week, many had become prostitutes. Many had illegitimate children. Fifty-one who married produced 165 children, 108 feebleminded. Not one of their husbands is “endowed with normal or near-normal intelligence.”

Concluded indignant Dr. Kanner: “Time alone will tell how many more feebleminded, illegitimate, neglected children this group of released patients will in the future bestow on a Commonwealth that can do nothing but look on and pay the penalty for the indiscriminate habeas corpus release by its courts of justice. . . . It is up to psychiatrists to give better understanding to lawyers and judges.”

One of those imbeciles was smart enough to establish a house of prostitution in Baltimore. Whether any connection still exists between the traffic in housemaids and in prostitutes was something which Baltimoreans had to think about last week when J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation suddenly pounced upon ten local houses and arrested 50 women. He believed them all victims of white slavery, pawns of a far-flung ring. Said he: “Conditions are very bad.”

Madness After Childbirth has steadily increased since 1931 to such extent that in some communities, one out of 500 women is affected. Hard times with “their immediate and remote effects upon personal and domestic harmony” make the additional stress of childbearing more than some women can endure, said Drs. Louis J. Karnosh & Justice M. Hope of Cleveland.

Achilles is a Cornell pig, neurotic pet of that university’s Prof. Howard Scott Liddell. Prof. Liddell taught Achilles to get an apple by lifting the lid of a box with his snout when he heard a buzzer. Sometimes the coveted apple was missing. Such disappointments put Achilles in such a mental state that he could not make up his mind to try for the apple at all. This was as truly a nervous breakdown as any human being ever suffered, said Prof. Liddell. Achilles “would lay his snout on the cover of the box, close his eyes and stand rigid, growling for a whole hour. In those hours even placing an apple on Achilles’ nose failed to make him stir or eat. We believe that this experimental neurosis is caused by the equivalent of a human conflict situation.”