| Description Of Item | Single press cutting, medical article on one side and Scotland-based classified ads on the other. Note written in ink on the classifieds: ‘Journal of [illegible] & [illegible] Jan 1872.’ From the collection of Thomas Laycock.
The article details Mr [Samuel Messenger] Bradley of Manchester who had examined the brain of a deceased 35-year-old man described as ‘an idiot.’ Bradley explains that there is no ‘traceable predisposing’ cause of the man’s ‘idiocy,’ stating that ‘the parents were intelligent, they were not related.’ Bradley describes the symptoms of the unnamed man’s affliction while alive, including being: ‘extremely feeble,’ ‘swaying to and fro, and constantly uttering a low moaning kind of note’, and only speaking a few words which he ‘could repeat, parrot-like.’ Bradley weighs the different sections of the brain of the deceased man, and suggests three categories that might cause ‘idiocy’ in a person: first is a small brain, second is the ‘imperfect anatomical connection of parts’ and third is the microscopic evidence of imperfection in the ‘cerebral structure itself’. Bradley notes that although no abnormalities were found under the microscope, ‘the non-detection of such abnormality proves nothing […] the want of quality, traceable throughout the body, existed also in the brain, although we are not able to say precisely in what the quality was wanting.’ |