Editorial
In ‘All's fair in love and war’—reviewing Mind wars, brain research and national defense by Jonathan Moreno and Military psychology, clinical and operational applications edited by Carrie Kennedy and Eric Zillmer—Edgar Jones (professor in the history of psychiatry at Kings College, London) examines the science of warfare and the activities of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in using neuroscience to assist national security, especially those applications that may make warriors more efficient and control civil unrest. Professor Jones explains the ambiguity, whereby—down the years—the professional combatant usually feels at peace with war and uneasy with peace and better able to perform in the real theatre than simulated danger. And he deals with the confusions of contemporary asymmetric warfare, whereby the soldier does not see an enemy camouflaged within civilian society, or otherwise distanced from the battlefield through the use of long-range weapons. He remains sanguine on the concept that military neuroscience can better equip tomorrow's GI to discharge his/her military responsibilities or deal with the strange but repetitive disorders from which—as nostalgia, shell shock, effort syndrome, low moral fibre and Gulf war syndrome—soldiers may suffer. But if neuroscience cannot easily manipulate warfare, battle undoubtedly does influence neuroscientists. In 1919, Henry Head published his collection of poems, Destroyers, most having previously appeared in magazines and in two earlier privately printed collections (Songs of La Mouche, 1910; and Pastoral, undated). The first, from ‘1914–18’, laments:How can I serve who am too old to fight?I cannot stand and wait
With folded hands, and lay me down at night
In restless expectation that the day
Will bring some stroke of Fate
I cannot help to stay.
Once, like the spider in his patterned web,
Based on immutable law,
Boldly I spun the strands of arduous thought,
Now seeming naught,
Rent in the sudden hurricane of war.
Within my corner I will take my place,
And grant me grace
Some delicate thing to perfect and complete
With passionate contentment, as of old
Before my heart grew cold.
This in the Temple I will dedicate,
A widow's mite,
Among more precious gifts, obscured from sight
By the majestic panoply of state.
But when triumphal candles have burned low
And valorous trophies crumbled into dust,
Perchance my gift may glow,
Still radiating sacrificial joy
Amid the ravages of moth and dust.
Evidently, Head had misgivings about reusing ‘dust’ in the last line. The copy of Destroyers owned by Harvey Cushing contains a note ‘H.H. told me August 1930 this should be "rust" not "dust"’. A manuscript copy of the poem sent by Head to Cushing ends ‘amid the ravages of moth and rust’ (SG Reich, Destroyers and other verses: Henry Head, the Poet, Arch Neurol 1988: 45; 1257–1260). Another copy dedicated by Head on November 11th 1926 ‘To Helen G-B’, makes the same correction in his hand. But a letter dated October 8th 1925 from Henry Head to Sir Charles Sherrington, on another matter, includes a typescript dated January 1915 indicating that the poem was written for Sherrington (whereas, the volume as a whole is dedicated to Ruth Mayhew Head—‘To Her without whose touch the strings would have been mute’) and has the uncorrected ‘dust’ not ‘rust’ in the last line. That letter refers to Sherrington's own ‘... beautiful verses, and you must have enough by now to fill at least a small volume’. Presumably, this encouragement was informed since, later that year, Sir Charles Sherrington did indeed publish The assaying of Brabantius and other verse, dedicating the volume to ‘Henry Head FRS’.
As part of our series of occasional papers, celebrating the sequicentenary of Sherrington's birth and the centenary of publishing The integrative action of the nervous system (see Brain, 2007: 130; 881–883, 884–886 and 887–894), John Fuller analyses the poetry of Sir Charles Sherrington (page 1981). Mr Fuller is a poet, novelist and critic who has held teaching appointments in Manchester and Oxford (where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College, as was Sir Charles Sherrington). Since 1960, his poetry and fiction have been recognized through the award of many literary prizes. For John Fuller ‘a good poem takes some irresolvable complication, worries it to death like a dog with a bone, and leaves it still unresolved’. Here, in ‘Trio’, he describes a pianist:
A banquet for one! But he toys with his food,Eyes closed, head tilted back in rapture
At the enormous table, the black table,
The table with three legs and a lid.
Mr Fuller points out that the theme of the principal work from which The assaying of Brabantius takes its name depicts the struggle between Hedonism and ‘acquiring nobility through altruism’... expressing the ‘Christian paradox that love is itself better if it involves anguish’. On publication, one reviewer felt that ‘Miss Sherrington’ yet had much to learn. John Fuller is somewhat more encouraging. He brings skills of the literary anatomist and diagnostician to his assessment of Sherrington's work: choriambic and anapestic tercets, quatrains and Petrarchan sonnets ‘driven with a sense of narrative propulsion ... [but with irregularities that] ... sometimes draw the reader up short’. John Fuller traces the influences on Sherrington and his ‘word-hoard’ (‘truth to feeling sometimes matched by the unambiguously fine line or appropriate image’) to John Keats. For Mr Fuller, ‘At Keats's Grave’ laments that poet's death aged 25 from tuberculosis but lacks the impact that Sherrington achieves with prose in Man on his nature through his analysis of the sublime indifference of Nature to human fate. Evidently, Sherrington also worried away at his wording. An early manuscript version of ‘At Keats's Grave’, sent to the dedicatee Geraldine Schafer (daughter of Sir Edward Sharpey Shafer) in 1912 and bound into a copy of Keats's Eve of St Agnes, differs substantially from that which Sherrington eventually published in 1925. The assaying of Brabantius has ‘a wider range than the slimness and tenor of the collection might at first suggest’ and, like Henry Head ‘too old to serve’, Sherrington also sought solace by writing poetry during the Great War:
Now in the cloister few the feet that roam,ours that must stay, who little can than wait,
exchange our tidings, good, ill, early, late,
and send our ‘god-speed’ to them past the foam,
the young fold, splashed with death in the trenched loam.
Ay, oil the hinges of the ancient gate,
keep burnished bright the goblet's silvern state
against the hour shall hail the soldier home.
You stately tower, from high you saw them go,
and have full many doughty scenes and fair
watched the swung bells above, shattering the air
to honour heroes, you too wait as though
of our poor hearth-bound presence scarcely ware,
you heard from far the filial bugles blow.
Here too, the original text published in the Oxford Magazine for Hilary Term 1916, and that printed in 1925 differ markedly, especially in the last sestet, from the version that Sherrington eventually settled upon in the 1940 (2nd) edition of The assaying of Brabantius —‘you’ for ‘thou’, ‘wait’ for ‘waitst’, and ‘saw’ for ‘sawst’ amongst other simplifications and clarifications. For Sherrington, poetry evidently became an easy way of communicating: in 1951, he thanked ED Adrian for a 94th birthday letter with the post-script:
‘Stars! How many there are!And this one too!
So then, I’m a star
And where are you?’
In ‘A zest for life’, Adam Zeman examines the influences on Sherrington apparent in the later writings (Man on his nature and the endeavour of Jean Fernel), published in his 80s and in which he considers the mind–body relationship. As Wilder Penfield concluded in ‘Sir Charles Sherrington, poet and philosopher’ (Brain, 1957: 80; 402–410): ‘in physiology he was a realist, a scientist seeking truth without bias ... he had faith, this old man who was forever young, that success would come to physiology in time, and understanding to scientist and philosopher alike ... Nature spoke to him with many tongues and with accents many. He understood her accents and could integrate them in his thinking until he seemed at last to comprehend the meaning of life, the design of the Creator’. Adam Zeman accommodates Sherrington's apparent dualism and explains how, writing in the 16th century, Jean Fernel provided a platform from which Sherrington explored mind as material. But, finally, he could not force himself over the ‘brink of physicalism’ because the material brain fails to provide a scientific basis for experience: ‘mental experience is not open to observation ... [and] has no ... channel of entrance to the mind. It is already of the mind ...’. Approaching his subject with guarded pessimism, Professor Zeman (philosopher and neurologist alike) considers these late works to be ‘marvellously enlightening excursions into questions of mind and matter, to which Sherrington brings clarification when he can, [and] acknowledges confusion when he must’.
Four papers in the current issue deal with aspects of vision. Marianne Dieterich and colleagues from Mainz (Germany) ask whether chronic deprivation of vestibular input results in plasticity of normal visual–vestibular connections (page 2108): they show that fMRI signals in response to induced optokinetic nystagmus are increased in the visual and oculomotor cortical systems, indicating that increased sensitivity in one modality (vision) may compensate for deprivations in the response of another (vestibular) despite no change in intensity of the underlying stimulus. Micaela Schmid and investigators from Pavia and Novara (Italy) come at the same problem from the other direction (page 2097): congenitally blind subjects and those with acquired loss of vision sway to much the same degree as those who can see but have their eyes closed whereas, under less stable conditions, blind subjects are unsteady irrespective of the duration of their visual loss—indicating an apparent absence of cross-modality compensation and suggesting that vision plays an obligatory role in the integration of afferent information contributing to balance. Yong Liu and collaborators from Beijing (China) also test the ability of those who have recently lost vision to compensate by deploying other senses (page 2085): using fMRI, they find little plasticity of functional connectivities between the occipital, parietal, temporal and frontal lobes, although connections between visual and language areas may selectively ‘open up’ especially in those using Braille early and more regularly. Silvia Savazzi and colleagues from Verona and Mantova (Italy) tackle the issue of why patients with visual neglect systematically differ in the errors they show when bisecting either long (rightward shift) or short (crossover to leftward bias) lines (page 2070): using an illusory device that induces perceptual distortions and with variations in line length, they provide evidence supporting the space anisometry hypothesis that, in those who neglect, contralesional space is relaxed, whereas ipsilateral zones are compressed resulting in directional biases in line bisection.
Russell Brain wrote extensively on many aspects of the nervous system, including a small monograph on Speech disorders: Aphasia, Apraxia and Agnosia (1961). This expanded his contribution to the second edition of Kinnier Wilson's Neurology (1954). The single 1961 chapter on agnosias surveys various syndromes affecting each of the special senses with an emphasis on visual agnosia for space; and it builds on two papers published in Brain during the Second World War. Brain's interest in aphasia and agnosia was fuelled by the clinical experience of cases seen at the London Hospital and the work of Sir Henry Head. Perhaps that influence went further for, at some time in the 1950s, Russell Brain published privately his own Poems and verses. The volume includes a poem for Sir Charles Sherrington celebrating his 90th birthday.
Man shapes the patterns of his mindAs models of the world without,
But to himself he long was blind
And found no answer to his doubt.
You first within the brain discerned
The meaning of its ordered ways,
And man of his own nature learned
To thread the labyrinthine maze.
Poet, you saw the vibrant nerves
Subdued to metrical control,
By which each one in rhythm serves
The guiding purpose of the whole.
These lines a homelier homage bring
Than all the laurels time has brought –
A wish as birthday offering
From world-wide children of your thought.
May age, which clouds the body's eye,
Still leave undimmed the inward sight
That reads life's secret poetry
With timeless wonder and delight!
In From the Archives, we review ‘Visual disorientation with special reference to lesions of the right cerebral hemisphere’ by W Russell Brain (Brain, 1941: 64; 244–272).
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