Word: braine
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...that her head was swelling like a little balloon. The tender fontanel at the top of her head was tense and bulging, and thick blue veins stood out like cords underneath her downy hair. The doctor shook his head, told them that the baby had hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and, like 2,000 other hydrocephalic children born in the U. S. every year, was probably doomed to imbecility or death. Water pressure from the interior of her brain, he said, would squeeze the baby's grey matter against her soft skull bones until her head became even larger...
Ventriculoscope. Buried in the middle of the brain are four ventricles or water reservoirs, the two largest shaped like a pair of ram's horns. Each ventricle is partly lined with feathery tissue called the choroid plexus. Function of the choroid plexus is to generate the fluid which bathes the outside of the brain and spinal cord. If the choroid plexus produces abnormal quantities of water, or if the brain fails to absorb the fluid which bathes it, hydrocephalus occurs...
Purpose of Dr. Scarff's operation on Alice was to destroy the choroid plexus in her first two ventricles, thus diminishing the water supply to her brain. (The third and fourth ventricles are smaller, produce minute quantities of water.) First he made a one-inch slit on the top of her scalp, cut out a small plug of bone. Into the tiny hole he inserted his ventriculoscope...
...Scarff's ventriculoscope is a metal tube three-eighths of an inch in diameter, ten inches long. At the bottom is a lens, two tiny electric lights, two threadlike rubber hoses, for maintaining adequate fluid pressure in the brain, and an electric wire for cauterizing. At the top of the instrument is an eye piece and an electric connection. Gently working the ventriculoscope through Alice's grey matter down to one of her ventricles, Dr. Scarff was able to see about two inches of choroid plexus. Turning on the electricity, he seared off all the feathery tissue...
...Milwaukee last week Dr. Roland Metzler Klemme, St. Louis surgeon, described what he considers the best modern technique for relief of tic douloureux. It is a brain operation performed with the patient in a sitting position, under local anesthetic. Dr. Klemme makes a hole about the size of a quarter in the skull under the temple, lifts up the brain, exposes the root of the fifth cranial nerve, which serves the upper and lower jaws and the eyes. He delicately separates the fibres, severs only the sensory jaw fibres. In this way he has successfully relieved some 200 tic sufferers...