Leeches for the unfortunate locksmith: self-inflicted posttraumatic transient cerebral blindness--mode of treatment and underlying mechanism (1826)

A flask full of jelly: the first in vitro model of concussive head injury--1830

IN 1830, THE French Military Surgeon Jean-Pierre Gama reported an experiment planned to unravel the mechanical events caused by head injury. His model was a round glass flask with a long neck filled with a gelatinous substance that resembled the consistency of the brain. Thumping the walls of the flask caused the movement of thin wires embedded in the "brain-like" material, thought to represent the spread of forces within the brain. Gama thought that he could thus observe oscillatory and vibratory movements of the wires representing the effects of concussion without visible structural brain lesions. Although it was crudely constructed, entirely subjective as to evaluation of results, and lacking the essential instrumentation that only modern technology can provide, this hypothesis-driven pioneer experiment should be regarded as the first to use the novel approach of physical modeling of the brain. Even today, this approach has not been fully exploited.