BROWN-SEQUARD, CummEs EDWARD, b. in the island of Mauritius, 1818; a French-American physiologist. He was educated and took the degree of M.D., in Paris, in 1840, and thenceforward devoted his attention to experimental physiology, occasion ally coming to the United States to lecture and make observations. His name is con nected with many interesting experiments with the blood, such as transfusion, flbriniz ing and defibriniziug, and with oxygen and other elements. He concludes that arterial blood is subservient to nutrition, and maintains the irritability of the muscles; and that venous blood is necessary to produce muscular contraction. He puts natural animal heat at 103° Fahr., four or five degrees higher than the standard of most physiologists. Con cerning the spinal cord, most authorities agree that its posterior columns are sensitive, and convey sensation to the brain; that the interior columns are motor, and convey the influence of the will to the voluntary muscles; and that the gray matter of the cord serves only to reflect impressions from the sensitive to the motor nerve roots. Brown
&quard concludes that the sensitive fibers do not communicate directly with the brain, but convey impressions to the gray matter of the cord, by which they are transmitted onward to the brain, and that their decussations or crossings take place on the cord itself, at or near the point at which they enter, not at the cerebellum or medulla oblon gata. He came to the United States to reside in 1864, and was appointed professor of the physiology and pathology of the nervous system in the medical department of Har vard university, where he remained four years. Returning to France in 1869, he was appointed professor of experimental and comparative pathology in the school of medi cine at Paris. In 1858, he started the Journal of the Physiology of Man and Animals; in 1869, he published Archives of Normal and Pathological Physiology. He again returned to the United States in 1873, began practice in New York city, and. with Dr. Seguin, commenced the publication of the Archives of Scientific and Practical Medicine.