Observations on the Clinical and Brain Wave Patterns of Professional Boxers

In the past 22 years about 44,000 patients with head injuries have been treated on the neurosurgical service at Kings County Hospital. In all this experience with the problem of craniocerebral trauma, few of these came under critical observation within one hour after injury. Hopeful of supplementing our knowledge of the precise sequence of clinical events that transpire immediately after a head injury, we accepted the offer of the New York State Boxing Commission to participate in a study on the effects of blows to the head sustained by professional fighters. Although the blows to the head inflicted in the boxing arena are for the most part milder than those sustained by the average patient admitted to the hospital after a street accident, the observations in this study have supplemented our ideas about human responses to mild cerebral trauma. MATERIAL AND METHOD The report comprises the study of the physical