Inside My Brain

THE warning in The Journal of the American Medical Association is not ambiguous: “There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages. ... The condition can no longer be ignored by the medical profession or the public.”

But what really makes the research and its conclusions so interesting is its timing: it appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association on Oct. 13, 1928. This raises the question — at least for me — as to why we are announcing the athlete concussion-dementia link as a new, and still somewhat debatable, issue some 80 years later.

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The paper is also a terrific reminder of early 20th-century medicine’s down-to-earth approach to research. Martland, the chief medical examiner in Essex County, N.J., began his research by hanging out at boxing matches. He titled the paper “Punch Drunk,” drawing on boxing cant. As he pointed out, boxing fans didn’t hesitate to malign injured boxers, derisively shouting “cuckoo” when obviously brain-damaged fighters shambled into a ring, and referring to those with dementia problems as “slug nutty.”

Martland did autopsies on more than 300 people who had died of head injuries, looking for patterns of brain damage. For his study of boxers, he talked a fight promoter into giving him a list of 23 former fighters he thought could be labeled as definitely punch drunk. Martland was able to track down only 10 of the former athletes, but in those cases, he found the promoter’s diagnosis was on target. Four were in asylums, suffering from dementia. Two had difficulty forming sentences or responding to questions. One was almost blind, two had trouble walking and one had developed symptoms similar to those of Parkinson’s disease.

Pretty much the best parts are above, but if you must.

And, because everything is political:

if our response has been slow, that’s mostly because the N.F.L., the National Collegiate Athletic Association and their allies have done an outstanding job, up until now, of ignoring and dismissing the medical record. Not everyone is happy about this, of course. Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, complained that “football as we know it” could be destroyed if we move toward greater protectiveness

I feel safe in diagnosing that comment as slug nutty.

Heh.