Brain Reaction to Experimental Injury After Hypothermia

FREEZING as an experimental method for producing brain lesions dates back to 1883 when Openchowski used this technique to study localization of cortical function (quoted by Speransky¹). No further report of this method appeared until 1926, when Speransky used freezing to produce injuries in a study of the convulsive state. Unfortunately, adequate morphologic descriptions of the lesions were not presented. It remained, therefore, for Scheider and Epstein²to record the first detailed account of the pathology of focal cerebral freezing; and this, too, was a study concerned primarily with epilepsy. Hass and Taylor³were the first to recognize that the freezing of brain produced a lesion which had the gross characteristics of the clinical entities, cerebral contusion and hemorrhagic infarction. In a study of cerebral hemorrhage and necrosis, the mortality from injury was shown to be related directly to the size of the lesion. Several investigations