SCIENTIFIC PHRENOLOGY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18757, 10 January 1923, Page 6

SCIENTIFIC PHRENOLOGY

ELECTRICITY AS STIMULUS. IMPROVING MENTAL POWER. Electric current laid on in schools, for application tv backward and indolent students, may bo an educational development of the future. According to Dr Bernard Hollander, the eminent mental specialist, galvanism applied to certain regions of the head has the effect of improving mental power. In an address to the annual congress of the British Phrenological Society recently, l)r Hollander, who presided, said that, stimulated by the results in Sweden of passing electric currents through school rooms, he had himself tried similar experiments. He found the method so successful that ho lias since treated a large number of patients deficient in nervous energy. That their power for work and their mental efficiency were .really increased thereby was proved by the cases of backward and indolent students who succeeded in examinations in which they had previously failed. Dealing with the mueh-laughed-at subject of phrenology, Dr Hollander contended that it was possible to have a science of the localisation of Die functions of the brain, as distinguished from the popular variety depicted on the familiar phrenological busts and applied colely to the reading of a man's character from the elevations and depressions of his cranium. Most people made no such distinction, and regarded phrenology as a species of quackery, devoid of foundation from beginning to end. They were unaware of the fact that Gall, its originator, was one of the greatest anatomists in medical history. , , , , , , ~ It ia acknowledged, he went on, by the leading anatomists, that "the skull is moulded upon the brain and grows with it," so that it can no longer be denied that the size and shape of the head conforms for all practical purposes, to the size and shape of the brain. . . . . Size of head was not a measure of intellect, because the brain has other functions as well. Even « capacious forehead did not signify'superior intellectual attainments, for it" might be merely an empty warehouse which had never been stocked with knowe<Vcry few people, indeed, made active use of their innate capacities; the average man was satisfied that A oqtiale B, because C, a supposed authority, had said so. The recent war caused a great deal of emotional dieturbance among combatants, but it was e. significant fact that of nil the British soldiers who received head injuries, only 0.375 per cent, went insane, and a considerable number of these were hereditarily t^Dr^liollande' concluded by pleading for mental hospitals in actuality, not in name only, as a necessary preliminary before progress in this department ol science can bo I expected.