Brain-damaged historians
(x-posted.) Somewhere in Silas Weir Mitchell’s voluminous correspondence on the brain damage of Civil War veterans—my notes are in California, I’m now in Texas—is an account of a Confederate soldier whose bullet-struck head recoiled into a dry-stone wall and performed a fortuitous auto-trepanation. The insult to his brain had been mitigated by the hole in head, but Mitchell feared the soldier would never regain normal cognitive function. As time tripped over nothing, cursed in tongues, begge
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