by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Left: Henry Head, in a photograph taken in 1914 or in some other year, the documentation being unclear.
Nowadays not many people read Brain on Head in Brain. That could change, because this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Brain’s mostly-admiring six-page essay called “Henry Head: A Man and His Ideas,” which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Dr. Head’s birth. Which means that this year we are all of us entitled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that happy event. Dr. Brain—who was also Lord Brain, Baron Brain of Eynsham—was editor of the journal Brain. It would have been surprising had he not written that essay about Dr. Head. That’s because Head preceded Brain (the man) as head (which is to say, editor) of the journal (the name of which, I repeat for clarity, is Brain). Head headed Brain from 1905 to 1923. Brain became head in 1954, dying in office in 1967. No other editors in the journal’s long history (it was founded in 1879) could or did boast surnames that so stunningly announced their obsession, profession, and place of employ. One of Dr. Brain’s final articles, in 1963, is called “Some Reflections on Brain and Mind.”
“Some Reflections on Brain and Mind,” Lord Brain, Brain, vol. 86, no. 3, 1963, pp. 381-402.
Dr. Head wrote many monographs, some quite lengthy, for Brain. The first, a 135-page behemoth, appeared in 1893, long before he became editor. In it, Dr. Head gives special thanks to a Dr. Buzzard, citing Dr. Buzzard’s generosity, the nature of which is not specified.
Dr. Russell Brain, right.
Reading Dr. Brain’s Brain tribute and other material about Dr. Head, one gets the strong impression that Head had a big head, and that it was stuffed full of knowledge, which Dr. Head was not shy about sharing. Brain writes that “Some men… feel impelled to impart information to others. Head was one of those.” Brain then quotes Professor H.M. Turnbull as saying:
I had the good fortune when first going to the hospital to meet daily in the mornings, on the steam engine underground railway, Dr. Henry Head. He… kindly taught me throughout our journeys about physical signs, much to the annoyance of our fellow travellers; indeed in his characteristic keenness he spoke so loudly that as we walked to the hospital from St. Mary’s station people on the other side of the wide Whitechapel Road would turn to look at us.
Brain says that Head “would illustrate his lectures by himself reproducing the involuntary movements or postures produced by nervous disease, and ‘Henry Head doing gaits’ was a perennial attraction.”
