PMID-19286295[0] Probing the human brain with stimulating electrodes: The story of Roberts Bartholow’s (1874) experiment on Mary Rafferty
- Excellent review / history.
- Actual citation: Experimental investigations into the functions of the human brain" The American Journal of the medical Sciences 1874
- Actual subject: Marry Rafferty
- Around his time people were shifting from using intuition and observation to direct treatment to using empiricism & science, especially from work on laboratory animals.
- One of the innovations that could not be tolerated by his colleagues was the "physiological investigations of drugs by the destruction of animal life." He was a bit of an outsider, and not terribly well liked.
- Before then the cortex was seen to be insensitive to stimulation of any kind.
- Ferrier 1974b: in the striatum all movements are integrated which are differentiated in the cortex" -- striatal stimulation produces general contraction, not specific contraction.
- Ferrier 1873 was the first to discover that AC stimulation yielded more prolonged and natural movements than DC.
- The Dura mater is extremely sensitive to pain.
- Mary Rafferty seems to have had a tumor (he calls it an ulcer) in the meninges (epithelioma).
- He probably spread infection into her brain through the stimulating needles.
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[0] Harris LJ, Almerigi JB, Probing the human brain with stimulating electrodes: the story of Roberts Bartholow's (1874) experiment on Mary Rafferty.Brain Cogn 70:1, 92-115 (2009 Jun) |
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