V
Physiologists may wait a long time before finding a more suitable subject on which to study the circulation of blood in the brain than my Bertino. He had a hole in the very middle of the forehead, that seemed made to allow one to look into the skull as an old Greek philosopher once wished to do with the human heart.
To my regret the man only sojourned for a very short time in Turin, and I could only study him during one week. He was a sturdy mountaineer, who suffered from home-sickness, and seemed to be ashamed of his disfigurement. In July 1877, as he was working under the belfry of his village, he was struck on the head by a brick which a mason, working near the roof, at a height of fourteen metres, let fall out of his hand. Bertino fell to the ground as though struck by lightning. He told me that he remembered nothing of it all, not even the blow he had received, and that he regained consciousness after one hour. The earliest recollection which he preserved of the accident was of the moment before the blow. He remembered that he was standing under the belfry watching a comrade dipping bricks into water; then came a period of darkness in his mind, and when he came to himself again he found himself, to his astonishment, in bed, while a surgeon held a watch before him and asked him what time it was. From that moment his mind had been quite clear. The terrible blow made an opening of the size of a shilling in the middle of the forehead. When the splinters of bone had been removed, the brain was seen through the opening, uncovered and pulsating. After having been twenty-four hours in bed, he came on foot to Turin. My friend, Dr. De Paoli, took me to see him. The patient had lost nothing of his power of movement, of his intelligence, his speech, or his memory; he was only very much afraid, and had a perpetual expression of distrust and timidity, even about the most unimportant things, which he tried in vain to conceal.
I must remark that in fractures of the skull the time favourable to study is very short. Large wounds admit with difficulty of the application of the instruments; the smaller ones are better adapted, but they close much sooner from underneath by cicatrisation. When I made the acquaintance of Bertino, the best time was already past; nevertheless the investigations which I made on him are, according to the judgment of competent physiologists, the most complete that have as yet been published.
Eighteen months later I wrote to him, asking him to come to Turin, as I wished to see him. He came at once, and told me that if he had not escaped from the hospital he would have died of melancholy; that he had not been able to bear being in rooms full of dying people, while at home wife and children and fields were awaiting him. The opening in the skull had closed, and the movements of the brain were no longer visible.