Fear Page #13

THE learned and eloquent Professor of Physiology at Turin has given us in the book which he has entitled “Fear,” an analysis of this mental condition and its accompanying physical states, which, marked as it is by scientific accuracy and couched in charming and even in poetical diction, will take high rank as a popular exposition of our knowledge of the expression of one of the most interesting of the emotions of both men and animals.

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[11] Brehm: Thierleben, p. 49. Leipzig, 1883.

Davancel tells of the profound emotion he experienced after having killed a monkey. 'The poor animal had a young one with her, and the bullet hit her in the region of the heart. She made a last effort, placed the young one on the branch of a tree and then fell down dead. I have never felt,’ he says, 'greater remorse at having killed a creature, which, even in dying, showed feeling so worthy of admiration.’[12]

Whether this is instinct or affection, whether there is any difference between the love of man and of the monkey, I do not feel called upon to decide. I acknowledge that it is necessary for the maintenance of the species that things should be thus, nor need our admiration for mechanisms made in this way suffer any diminution.

I do not think I deserve praise for loving my mother. I remember what she did for me; and even if all our affection were only a simple automatic correspondence of instincts, if I knew that neither had the power to act otherwise, I should be just as glad to be constituted in such a manner that I cannot repress the throbbings of my heart whenever her face rises in my memory. I do not think that my tears and sorrow show less of love on that account.

And if I still feel myself drawn to the grave of the mother who died long years ago, thus cherishing her memory by visiting it in the greatest joys and sorrows of my life, I am glad to be an automaton feeling the religion of love in this renewal of the grief and tears of the last farewell.

[12] Brehm: Thierleben, p. 106. Leipzig, 1883.

CHAPTER IV

THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD IN THE BRAIN DURING EMOTION

I

When we have drawn on a pair of very tight gloves, we feel, if we pay attention, a slight throbbing in the fingers, corresponding to the rhythm of the cardiac pulsations. This throbbing arises because, by every contraction of the heart, one hundred and eighty cubic centimetres of blood--that is, about as much as can be contained in an ordinary drinking-glass--are driven out of the cavity of the thorax. As this wave of blood penetrates the various organs of the body they swell, as is the case with the arteries which dilate at every pulsation and then resume their former volume. When the hands are unconfined we notice nothing, but if we squeeze them into gloves, or our feet into tight shoes, we feel something beating in fingers and toes. This is the blood gushing in, and as the skin cannot yield as in ordinary conditions, the extremely delicate nerve-filaments which branch into it are pressed at every pulsation. If our finger swells from a whitlow, an inflammation, a knock or a burn, immediately the physiological pulsations, unnoticed before, become continuous, causing an acute, stinging pain. The blood flows more abundantly to the inflamed part, the elasticity of the tissues diminishes, the skin becomes more unyielding, an increased pressure on the nerves ensues, and these, rendered more sensitive through the injury, communicate a painful sensation to the brain which pricks unceasingly, keeping time with the rhythm of the heart.

In no organ is the supply of blood so abundant as in the brain; it is sufficient to state that one-fifth of the blood in our body goes to the head. Often, when lying on our side with our cheek on the pillow, we hear the waves of blood passing from the heart to the brain. The arteries, in pulsating, raise the skin, and this movement occasions a slight friction against the pillow, which then propagates itself to the ear. But it is not the beating of the blood against the walls of the vessels, as we feel it on the carotid artery of the neck, or on the radial artery of the hand and elsewhere, which most interests us. A whole world of important facts in the physiology of the emotions and in the circulation of the blood would still be unknown if physicians were still only feeling the pulse, as has been done from the earliest days of medicine until now.

With the old methods we should never have succeeded in observing the spectacle of continuous and ever-varying changes which the movement of the blood operates in the brain, the hand, or the foot.

The physiologist used to be like a man wishful to study the life of a city, and only able to do this by looking down from a terrace at the coming and going of the crowd, the perpetual stream of people in the street. Only of late years have we succeeded in penetrating into the houses by the roof, in spying out the inner life of each family, in studying the irrigation of the organs by the blood while they are at work or in repose.

The pulse in the finest branches of the vessels and in the inward recesses of the organs is such a subtile, delicate phenomenon that we need the assistance of special instruments to intensify it before we can study it. I shall not do as many naturalists do, who think they should conceal the artistic side of their investigations from the fear of desecrating science.

I know that every experimental work possesses an interesting side, which is quite lost owing to the aridity and severity with which scientific treatises are written, and I therefore abandon myself to the recollections of my investigations, careless of following the style of popular scientific books.

II

The first work which I published upon the circulation of blood in the human brain brings sad recollections to me. It was in June 1875 that my friend, Professor Carlo Giacomini, invited me to visit one of his patients in the syphilitic ward. It was a peasant woman, thirty-seven years of age, who, after having borne six children, had been infected by her husband with the most terrible disease to which a mother may fall a victim. For nine years the deadly poison had raged in her bones, and, with only short intervals of respite, had corroded a great part of the skeleton and destroyed the upper part of the skull from the nasal bones to the occiput. Medical art had proved powerless to arrest the disease. When Professor Giacomini took the woman out of pity into the hospital, her face was disfigured, her body was covered with sores and scars, the skin of the head was detached in various parts, the corroded skull had a blackish colour, like dead bones encased in living flesh.

It was after hearing from this unhappy woman the story of her misfortune, and during the intense emotion which pity for her aroused, that I saw for the first time, through the fissures of the decayed bones, the movement of the uncovered brain. Even to-day, eight years later, when I think of that moment, a shiver runs over me as it did then.
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