Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century

A Biography of Henry Head

L. S. Jacyna

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780822981763
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground. L. S. Jacyna argues that these advances must be contextualized within wider Modernist debates about perception and language. In his time, Head was best known for his research into the human nervous system. He did a series of experiments in collaboration with W. H. R. Rivers in which cutaneous nerves were surgically severed in Head's arm and the stages by which sensation returned were chartered over several years. Head's friend, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, drew out the epistemological implications of how, in this new conception, the nervous system furthered the knowledge of the world.

1 THE MAKING OF A NEUROLOGIST

On 7 November 1926 Henry Head, MD, FRS, set out to write an autobiography. By this date Head was an eminent metropolitan physician who combined an appointment at the London Hospital with a private practice in Harley Street. His special interest was in the diseases of the nervous system, including such ‘functional’ disorders as hysteria and neurasthenia. He combined his clinical work with scientific investigations into the workings of the brain and nerves. In recognition of these researches Head had been nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. 1926 had seen the publication of Head’s monumental two-volume study of Aphasia and Kindred Disorders, a work that was widely recognized as marking an epoch in the study of the subject. Head’s devotion to science was matched by an enthusiasm for literature, music and the plastic arts. He was an authority on the poetry of Heinrich Heine and had published a volume of his own verse. For more than twenty years Head had been together with his wife Ruth née Mayhew, a relationship that by all accounts was exceptionally happy and enriching to both partners.

By November 1926 Head was also in the grip of Parkinson’s disease. This affliction was to end his active career and force him into premature retirement. For the final fourteen years of his life, Head’s exceptionally active mind was imprisoned in an ever more infirm and recalcitrant body. As a neurologist, Head knew better than any the nature of his condition and its likely prognosis. It seems plausible that a realization that his life had in a sense already come to an end was what led Henry to put down some recollections of his early life. These autobiographical notes are among the few typewritten items in the Head archive and had presumably been dictated to a secretary. By the time the document was composed, Head was unable to use a pen and relied on others to record his words.

Childhood

Henry Head was born on 4 August 1861 at 6 Park Road in Stoke Newington, London. His father was to recall: ‘you came into the world at 20 minutes to midnight after a very long and anxious day’.¹ Head was in later life to ascribe some significance to the day of his birth. Because he was born on the Sabbath, Head believed he had ‘the good fortune to be what the Germans call a “Sonntagskind”…’.²

Harry, as he was known, was the eldest child of what was to become a large family. His bond with his mother was in his childhood and youth strong; as late as 1900, while on holiday in Egypt, she wrote: ‘my first born, my first thoughts are for you now as always’.³ His relations with his father, although cordial, seem to have been more distant. Nonetheless, Harry was proud to report the judgment of one of Head senior’s colleagues that ‘the characteristics of my father’s life were judgment and kindness’.⁴

In his ‘Autobiography’, Head noted that both his father and mother were of ‘Quaker stock’. His father – also called Henry – was the son of Jeremiah Head, who had been Mayor of Ipswich. His mother Hester was a Beck and therefore connected by blood to the Lister family. A year after Henry’s birth, his father left the Society of Friends to join the Anglican Communion. No reason is given for this conversion but Henry senior was building a prosperous career for himself as an insurance broker at Lloyds of London. Nonconformity in religion might have been an obstacle in the path of his professional progress. Many nonconformists converted to Anglicanism as they rose up the social scale.

Head was thus never a Quaker in the sense of observing the forms and practices of the Society of Friends. His parents’ change of confession did not, however, impede continued social contact between the Head family and the close-knit north London Quaker community. Through these links Henry grew keenly aware of the scientific attainments of those who had come from a similar background to his. In particular, Marcus Beck (1843–93), his mother’s cousin and an intimate of the Head household, was an ardent follower of the antiseptic revolution instigated by the surgeon, Joseph Lister (1827–1912). Aft er working with Lister in Glasgow, Beck had helped introduce antiseptic surgery at University College Hospital in London. He also played a prominent role in making the bacteriological doctrines of Robert Koch accessible to the British medical community. ‘Thus’, Head recalled, ‘I was brought up in an atmosphere of modern science and in an attitude of worship for the great man [Lister] who was connected with my own people’.⁵

This sense of belonging to a community with a proud scientific heritage⁶ formed an important aspect of Head’s sense of self and did much to determine his own path: ‘I cannot remember the time I did not wish to take Medicine as my career in life’.⁷ When in 1904 the eugenist Francis Galton circulated to Fellows of the Royal Society a questionnaire designed to identify the presence of ‘hereditary genius’ in their families, Head took care in his return to note his blood links not only with Lister, but also with Thomas Young (1773–1829), the author of the wave theory of light.⁸

Head may also have owed a less tangible debt to his Quaker heritage. Head lost his faith as a young man. As an adult he eschewed all religious belief and assumed an attitude of stern, unflinching scientific naturalism. One of the most striking aspects of his personal writing is the entirely secular nature of his outlook. Head did not even feel any need to argue against Christianity; for the most part, he simply ignored it.

Nonetheless, according to Gordon Holmes, although Head gave the impression ‘of being a severe materialist, he was interested in certain forms of mysticism, probably due to the influence of the Quaker atmosphere in which he was brought up’. Holmes, who had collaborated with Head in scientific investigations, took a dim view of this aspect of Head’s character. It had in fact, Holmes averred, detracted from Head’s performance as a scientist: ‘A rigidly scientific and objective outlook … was in him combined with a vivid imagination which at times seemed to carry his ideas beyond the bounds of probability’.⁹ The tone of disapprobation says much about Gordon Holmes’s own conception of the qualities a scientist should possess.

Some of the most distinctive aspects of Head’s scientific persona may indeed be traced to his Quaker background. Quakerism encouraged interest in the natural world. In particular, each individual was deemed to possess an ‘inner light’ that enabled him or her to discern a divine order in even the most mundane object. The Quaker stress upon direct personal observation of nature also encouraged an anti-authoritarian attitude to established hierarchies and orthodoxies in science.¹⁰ At an early age, Head repudiated any notion of divine design in the world. Nonetheless, in his own researches he strove to attain a unique and original insight into the workings of the nervous system, one that depended in large part upon an ability to grasp the essential order that underlay a complex set of phenomena. His robust individualism and faith in his own insight oft en led him into direct conflict with the established scientific order. In his personal and aesthetic writings, Head, moreover, represented the natural world in lyrical and even rapturous terms as permeated with a transcendental beauty. The relationship between the laborious experimenter and the poetic Head was complex and he was himself equivocal on the relationship between art and science. The poet who enthused about German Romantic literature and who celebrated the glories of nature in both prose and verse was not, however, entirely banished when Henry Head took on the character of scientific observer and discoverer.

The 65 year-old Head recalled a variety of seemingly miscellaneous details about his childhood. His nurse was called Eliza. He had evidently retained contact with her because he noted that: ‘at the time I write she is still alive’. At the time of Henry’s birth, the Head family had inhabited a ‘small semi-detached dwelling with a tiny garden behind it’, and had made do with one servant. As the fortunes of Henry Head senior improved – and as more children arrived – the family moved to a series of more spacious houses. In 1865 the Heads arrived at a house in Albion Road with a good-sized garden and its own stables. From the age of six Henry and his brother Charlie ‘had a couple of white ponies to ride, which was a great delight to us’. Often their father would join them on these rides.¹¹

On 28 May 1866, at the age of four, Harry composed his first letter. He advised his mother: ‘I have made some glue. The bottle is full now indoors … Charlie send his love and a kiss. He is playing with a little horse. Little Hugh and baby are much better so are [Eliza] and Elizabeth’. Some fifty years later, Ruth Head found this letter and saw it as early evidence of Head’s propensity to become a ‘discoverer’. She assured her husband: ‘you have not changed the weeest bit. How much I hope your bottle of glue is quite safe and beautifully sticky upstairs in your room at Middlecott’.¹² By this date, the glue had become a metaphor for the scientific manuscript Head was writing while staying at a friend’s house.

In 1899 the adult Head had experienced a curious flashback to these early days. He told Ruth Mayhew that while wandering around a friend’s house in Tunbridge Wells:

I suddenly came on one [room] with bed, furniture and belongings that seem to awake memories of my childhood. I had that uncanny feeling of something burnt in on that memory in every small detail so long ago that one is in doubt whether it is not a dream or one of those freaks of recent memory. [?] the old nurse who still haunts the long empty nursery and who is dried up like a preserved pippen I found that in this room I had had the measles 30 years ago. Wandering round that garden I found a child’s wheelbarrow dated 1866 and I remembered that this sturdy toy had so fascinated me that father had made me one like it – which has alas! long gone to dust.¹³

In 1870 the family moved to a larger house on Stamford Hill. They were by now sufficiently prosperous to employ the artist William Morris (1834–96) as a decorator. Among his many endeavours, Morris had set up a firm dedicated to introducing the fine arts to every detail of home decoration. Hester Head had taken the initiative in engaging Morris. Henry (who would have been eight or nine at the time) recalled that he had accompanied his mother on a visit to Morris’s office in Red Lion Square; he even provided an account of the conversation that passed between them:

Morris asked when she had put forward the her request, ‘What’s your husband?’ She answered ‘An underwriter’. To this Morris replied ‘Oh something in the City¹⁴ – I suppose you would call him a merchant. I’ve never decorated a merchant’s house and I’ll do yours for you’.

Decorating a merchant’s house proved no easy task for Morris. The workmen engaged for the job failed to meet his exacting standards, and in the end Morris mixed and applied the paints himself. Henry remembered that Morris:

Took infinite pains to the effects he desired and even painted the little panes of our toy cupboard. One day he arrived with a brass candelabra which he had bought on one of his journeys in Holland, saying, ‘This will exactly suit your Library’.¹⁵

While many of these reminiscences appear random, or as the recounting of prized family anecdotes, Head endowed some of his childhood experiences with a peculiar significance. As with many Victorian families, ‘children came to my parents thick and fast’. Before the arrival of the ‘annual baby’ Henry was despatched to his grandmother’s house on Stamford Hill. His recollection of these stays is filled with nostalgia and affection. The grandmother wore traditional Quaker dress and an appropriate quiet reigned in her home – in stark contrast to the domestic hubbub with which Henry had usually to contend. At home he remembered ‘creeping under the sofa to read the Arabian Nights in order to escape the annoyance of the riotous younger children’. At his grandmother’s house no such extreme measures were needed: ‘For the greater part of the day we sat in her morning-room where we also had our meals … There were plenty of charming block puzzles to be put together, and spillikins were my great delight’.¹⁶ This motif of a desire to escape from the clamour of the workaday world to place of calm where puzzles could be solved was to recur in Henry’ later life.

These trips to Stamford Hill were not, however, moments of pure self-indulgence. Henry’s grandmother was:

extremely strict, insisting that whatever game was played the materials should be packed away always in an orderly manner. Moreover, she taught us that any game begun should be properly finished and I always remember her aphorism ‘If it is worth beginning it is worth finishing’.

This lesson, the mature Henry Head maintained, had always stood him in good stead; indeed, it embodied the discipline and methodical habits essential to good scientific work. When years later he returned thanks ‘for the Royal Medallists at the annual dinner of the Royal Society, I said that we Fellows of the Society were the sort of people who had been trained never to relinquish our tasks at the bidding of intrusive nurses and teachers’.¹⁷

Other of Henry’s recollections of childhood also seemed to prefigure his future course. One of his earliest memories was of ‘carefully preserving in a hidden drawer a scalpel and a piece of lint that I had succeeded in annexing from my cousin’s [Marcus Beck] bag’. When he was eight an epidemic of scarlet fever swept through the Head household. After Henry had recovered, the family physician, Mr Brett, took him into his house for a few days. One day at breakfast Henry claimed that he startled his host ‘by pouring a little tea into a tea-spoon and heating it over the spirit-lamp, carefully inspecting the result as I had seen him do so often during my illness to see if he could detect albumen in the urine’.¹⁸

Head’s formal education began at the age of five. He and a small group of other ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index