Wanted: Dead Brains

"Let Bishops, Senators, wrestlers, criminals . . . everybody give psychiatrists their brains for dissecting after death," last week suggested Professor Adolf Meyer, Johns Hopkins' famed Swiss-born psychiatrist. Professor Meyer. 67, a bearded didactic Zwinglian* called it "a crime against civilization that we let any brain pass unexamined when it has done its life work."

His purpose: "To know consistent differences between the brilliant man and the dullard, the scholar and the professional wrestler. . . . To know whether the brain can show what has to be born, and how much the brain we are born with can be expected to develop by use as well as suffer from misuse and disease. We must learn what we may dare to do in brain surgery. We must know more about changes under drugs and complexities of function; more about the nutritional support the brain depends upon to do its best."

*Huldreich Zwingli (1484--1531), Swiss Reformer, taught that the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was merely a memorial service with no mystic significance.

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