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The neurologist who cut the nerves.

scientific tradition of experimenting with oneself goes way back. Isaac Newton, for example, introduced a needle in your eye down to the bone eye to see what happened, and Dr. Barry Marshall drank a Petri dish full of bacteria to find the causes of stomach ulcers. But the case that concerns us here is one of the best documented in the history of science.



The neurologist Henry Head, the type of photo, made tremendous progress in the early twentieth century in understanding the nervous system and in particular the somatosensory system using a very unorthodox method: using a cut colleague and reconnected her own nerves to study the recovery of sensation.

For many years, Dr. Head had studied the recovery from an injury to the nerves of his patients, but these were not able to adequately describe the process and provide the data needed. Therefore concluded that it should prove about himself and document the process.



The April 25, 1903, aided by his colleague, Dr. Sherr, Henry Head was dividing the radial and external cutaneous nerves outer side of his left arm, which was completely numb for weeks. The experiment lasted for four years in which Head was describing in detail the recovery of sensation. The documentation of his work ("A human experiment in nerve division") includes photographs of his arm, on which drew a map with the sensations he was recovering.



The first sensations returned after the first 43 days. To gather more data, Head introduced the arm hot and cold water and record any variation. At 86 days, the arm began to feel the prick of a needle, but still did not detect any change in temperature. 112 days after he began to notice the cold water and took 161 days to appreciate the first reactions to heat.

Gradually, the nerve connections of the arm was rearranging and restoring the ability to sense small changes, which helped them to understand that different "Somatosensory" are processed separately and then combined to generate the sensation of touch. This and subsequent work allowed Head to advance knowledge of how our network of nerves and would make him one of the most distinguished neurologists of the early twentieth century.