Tweenbrain & Stomach

Harvey Williams Gushing, Harvard's great brain surgeon, celebrated his 62nd birthday last week in Toronto, by hypothesizing that stomach ulcers are caused by brain trouble.

Deep within the brain is a biologically ancient section called the diencephalon or tweenbrain.* Here the sensations on smell, sight, visceral activity, body position, temperature and pain pause a jiffy on their way to the thinking part of the brain. When one has a general feeling of discomfort, his tweenbrain is trying to tell his main brain an incoherent story. Vague emotions reflect the tweenbrain's mentally low-grade activities. Stomach "nervousness" must also have some relation to the diencephalon, for it to some extent controls digestion and other vegetative processes.

Seventeen years ago Dr. Gushing operated on a tumor of the brain. He had performed the same operation success fully many times. This patient died. Dr. Gushing was puzzled. Autopsy showed extraordinary cracks and ulcers of the stomach. Three times during subsequent years, among thousands of successful cerebrotomies, did the same fatal conjunction of gastric ulcers and diencephalic tumors occur. Was there causal relation ship? Dr. Gushing has decided affirmatively.

Validity of Dr. Cushing's hypothesis (now that it is offered it can be tested in many ways) lay in his primacy among brain surgeons and medical scholars. A dozen institutions have loaded him with honorary degrees in arts, medicine, science, law and literature. He is a Distinguished Service Medalist, a Companion of the Bath, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Medicine has given him a "homage book," like the one it recently gave Professor James Ewing (TIME, Jan. 12). Not his least valued kudos is the Montclair Yale Bowl given each year by Yale alumni living in Montclair, N. J. to one distinguished Yale man who has achieved his "Y in Life."

Additional validity of the Gushing hypothesis lay in the fact that the cause of gastric ulcers has been unknown. Simple acute gastric ulcer occurs more often among young anemic women, chronic ulcer in men. Especially prone to the ailment are housemaids and shoemakers. Ulcers may occur after a blow in the region of the stomach. Anemia predisposes, especially in women. The disease may be found in connection with diseases of the heart, arteries, liver, gall-bladder and appendix. The present tendency is to charge infections, especially of the teeth and tonsils, as the probable cause of stomach ulcers. A deeper-laid cause is, according to Dr. Cushing's suggestion, emotional stress, worry, overwork arising from the contingencies of life. These derange the tweenbrain. The tweenbrain deranges the stomach.

*I.e., between-brain.

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