Quotes C.S. Sherrington, 'Obituary: David Ferrier, 1843-1928', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 103 (1928), pp. viii-xvi.
Description:

'As Ferrier wrote a short while after his investigations at the asylum, with electrical stimulation:

[we] can begin at the outworks, at the organs of sense and motion, with which the nervous system communicates; we can study their operations during life, we can experimentally vary their circumstances; we can find how they act upon the brain and how the brain reacts upon them.'

' (140-141)

'C.S. Sherrington commented that after 1873, '[t]he next decade saw a flowing tide of research setting toward localisation... A localisation vogue reigned for nearly a quarter of a century, and became in due course tedious and relatively infertile. But the importance of the work which ushered it in cannot be forgotten.' Whilst his comment that localisation experiments became 'tedious' is a subjective one, indicating a later outlook, it also reflects just how copied Ferrier's methods were.' (142)

Quotes David Ferrier, 'Experimental Researches in Cerebral Physiology and Pathology', West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports 3 (1873), pp. 30-96.
Description:

'Ferrier accepted, and had placed at his disposal 'the resources of the Pathological Laboratory of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, with a liberal supply of pigeons, fowls, guinea-pigs, rabbits, cats and dogs for the purposes of... research.'

Ferrier realised not only the implications of Fritsch and Hitzig's work, but also its shortcomings, noting that their 'researches in this direction were not carried very far, nor do they... clearly define the nature and signification of the results at which they arrived.' He had earlier intended to study cortical functions with the technique of Nothnagel - damaging portions of the brain with chromic acid - but found that methods of ablation, 'however well they may be carried out and accurately circumscribed, involve the observation of negative phenomena, which, in a subject like cerebral physiology, is necessarily surrounded by great and often insurmountable difficulties.' So instead, he took on Fritsch and Hitzig's method, and importantly adapted it by abandoning the use of 'galvanic' stimulation (direct current) in favour of induction or 'Faradic' current. With electrical induction, Ferrier produced sustained and deliberate movements in the animals under investigation, leading to the results presented in his seminal paper in the third volume of the Reports, 'Experimental Researches in Cerebral Physiology and Pathology'.' (139-140)

'in his 1873 paper for the Reports he constantly reiterated to his audience that he had replicated all tests ('these experiments.on rabbits I have repeated many times, and always with the same results')... He was also mindful of making sure that his observations were verified by others, hence all the major original findings in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum laboratory had been confirmed 'in the presence of my aforementioned friends''. (141)

Quotes Henry Maudsley, 'Insanity and its Treatments', Journal of Mental Science 17 (1871), pp. 311-334.
Description:
'Maudsley, who stressed the view that all mental disorders were nervous disorders, was opposed to the idea that mental functions could be understood by... physiological means. 'Neither in health nor in disease is the mind imprisoned in one corner of the body', he argued.' (135)

Quotes J. Crichton-Browne, 'Presidential Address', Journal of Mental Science 24 (1878), pp. 345-373.
Description:

'Crichton-Browne, seeing the potential that further study in this area [electical stimulation of the cerebral cortex] had for his own school of research, and motivated by the concern that, in those 'regions of psychological enquiry, which are in such close contact with our own field [medical psychology], the work is again being carried on by those who are unconnected with us', thus invited Ferrier back... to conduct more electrical experiments in rooms of the asylum. ' (139)

Quotes J.B. Sanderson, 'Note on the excitation of the surface of the cerebral hemispheres by induced currents', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 23 (1873-1874), pp. 368-370.
Description:

'the Vice-President of the Royal Society for 1874-75, physiologist John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, demonstrated an experiment to specifically provide evidence against the presence of motor centres in the cerebral cortex [proposed by David Ferrier]. He wrote that 'although Dr. Dupuy has failed to prove that the movements he described are of the same nature with those described by Dr. Ferrier, the latter has not proved they are different.' In front of the Royal Society, he displayed experiments that appeared to prove that electrical stimulation of the cortex simply diffused to the lower centres, and that this was the cause of the motor movements Ferrier was able to display.' (148)

Quotes J.C. Bucknill and D.C. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine (4th ed.) (London, 1879).
Description:

'Bucknill and Tuke noted that Ferrier 'does not regard one part of the brain as the organ of the mind, and another part as the organ of motion, &c., but the same parts as having but a subjective and objective function'. '[T]he endeavour to reduce mental phenomena, in the last analysis, to their motor and sensory physiological equivalents', they argued, would lead the way to 'a localization of mental function, and therefore the correlation of morbid cerebral and morbid mental conditions, out of which a classification [of insanity] may be possible.'' (135-136)

Quotes W.A.F. Browne, 'Impairment of language, the results of cerebral disease', West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports 2 (1872), [pp.?].
Description:

Browne's 'essay 'Impairment of language, the result of cerebral disease', showed the reflections of one of phrenology's early proponents living to see this revival of cerebral localization [at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum during the 1870's], still faithfully adherent to the old discipline and convinced of its real explanatory power. Thus whilst proposing to 'regard aphasia from a somewhat new point of view', he actually situated contemporary work in the light of Gall's phrenology, which 'gave an impulse to the cerebral localization of our faculties, the effect of which is especially visible in our own days'. Browne's report, which relied heavily on Frederic Bateman's large book On Aphasia (1870), rejected any modern approaches to cerebral localizarion in favour of phrenological organology, even if physiogical and pathological evidence as to the localization of such an.organ or faculty [language] was as yet incomplete or contradictory.' (137)

Quotes W.B. Carpenter, 'On the physiological import of Dr Ferrier's Experimental Investigations into the Functions of the Brain', West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports 4 (1874), pp. 1-23.
Description:

'In elaborating [his view on the function of the cerebral hemispheres],... he [Carpenter] showed how he diverged from Ferrier's understanding in holding on to older ideas. He wrote:

I am disposed to believe that it is the augmented activity of the re-action between the Blood and the Nerve-substance, producing an excessive tension like that of an overcharged Leyden jar, rather than the direct stimulation of the nerve-substance itself, which causes the discharge of the Nerve-force that produces movement.

Carpenter did not think that the cerebral cortex directly stimulated the motor nerves, but rather that, in his words, it 'plays downwards on the motor centres contained within the Axial Cord; from which, and not from the Cerebral convolutions, the motor nerves take their real departure'. Stimulation merely excited a state of hyperaemia within a specific region of the cortex, which then acted upon the lower centres of the brain already known to be linked to muscular movements: his evidence was that when stimulated, some of Ferrier's dogs continued their purposive movements after the electrodes had been removed, but hyperaemia remained. As he put it, 'this could scarcely be the case if the stimulus acted directly on the nerve-substance. Whether the audience of the conversazione were convinced by this analysis is unknown, but Carpenter included it in revised versions of his Primciples of Mental Physiology - originally published in 1852 [sic] - with post-1874 editions including a 14-page appendix that almost directly replicated his.conversazione speech.' (146-148)

 

'If Carpenter questioned the novelty of Ferrier's findings, he was in no way uncertain of their validity, arguing that

the fact that other experimenters have not obtained the positive results which Dr. Ferrier has over and over again publicly exhibited, merely shows, in my opinion, that they have not succeeded in obtaining the precise conditions which are essential to the success of the experiments.

' (148)

Quotes W.B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 6 eds. (New York and London, 1874-1888).
Description:

' Carpenter included it [his 1874 analysis of the import of Ferrier's researches] in revised versions of his Primciples of Mental Physiology - originally published in 1852 [sic] - with post-1874 editions including a 14-page appendix that almost directly replicated his.conversazione speech.' (146-148)

Quotes Anon, 'Complimentary Dinner to Sir James Crichton-Browne', Journal of Mental Science 77 (1931), pp. 651-661.
Description:

'Crichton-Browne made the brain the centre of the asylum's work while he was there [the West Riding Lunatic Asylum], and built a programme of research that attempted to link the mental and physical conditions of insanity with the specific appeearances of the brain. He wrote that 'it was the structure of the brain and nervous system, their histology, their responses to electrical stimulation, their degenerative changes, their abridgement of function by destruction of parts, that mainly occupied our attention.'' (134)

'At Wakefield, Crichton-Browne was... engaged in his own quest to turn his provincial asylum into a school of scientific research on insanity and the brain. At that time, he later noted,

Gratiolet had just identified the cerebral convolutions, Broca had localized aphasia; Brown-Sequard had produced artificial epilepsy; Gowers had demonstrated the syphilitic origin of locomotor ataxia; Duchenne had traced muscular atrophy to the motor tract; Darwin was dominant; George Lewes, Herbert Spencer and, above all, Maudsley had just entered the field; [and] Lockhart Clarke had begun his microscopical examinations[.]

' (139)

Quotes Anon, 'The West Riding Asylum', British Medical Journal 2 (1875), p. 680.
Description:
'The BMJ, linking Ferrier and others associated with the asylum back to Bell and Marshall Hall as 'benefactors of mankind', noted that Wakefield, "under the initiative of its present most able director, was affording facilities for the furtherance of the studies of these men, and for the application of their work to the treatment of mental disease; and in doing so, with the hearty concurrence of the visiting magistrates... was setting a high example, which could not but be fruitful in great results, and might well be widely imitated." The asylum was seen as home to the leading edge of neurological research.' (135)