HEAD INJURY

Abstract

The subject of head injury has long interested physicians. Hippocrates¹(born 460 B. C.) noted grave symptoms and contralateral convulsions following injury to the head. He attributed these changes to fracture of the bone and apparently not to injury of the brain substance. Commentators during the following centuries added little to his descriptions. Celsus²(25 B. C. to 50 A. D.) mentioned cerebral hemorrhage without injury of the skull after trauma to the head. Lanfancus³(died about 1306), in the thirteenth century, wrote about "the brain when it is shaken by concussion or by severe beating without fracture of the skull or injury to the skin." Berengarius de Capri,⁴in 1517, also admitted that concussion may at times occur without fracture of the skull. Ambroise Paré,⁵a great admirer of Hippocrates, in 1575 ascribed the symptoms of commotio cerebri to rupture of the diploic and