Henry Head

Biography

Early life

Henry Head was born on 4 August 1861 at number 6, Park Road, Stoke Newington (a district in the London Borough of Hackney), as the eldest son of Henry Head and his wife Hester Beck and one of eleven children. 'Harry', as he was called throughout his childhood, was of strong Quaker roots and Head once described his parents as being "the centre of a multitude of friends and relations."

Head's father was an insurance broker for Lloyd's Bank and the third son of Jeremiah Head, formerly the Mayor of Ipswich, and Mary Howard. His mother was the daughter of Richard Beck, who had been a partner of his uncle J.J Lister in a wine business in London, and his wife Rachel. Head inherited a strong love of literature from his mother's side of the family through which he was related to E.V Lucas, the author. Through his mother Head also had surgical blood, related as she was to Marcus Beck. Several of Head's siblings were also to be successful in their own fields: Francis Head joined Lloyd's alongside his father and became the director of Henry Head and Co. until his death, aged 37, in 1905. Christopher Head, a Conservative Party councillor and mayor of Chelsea from 1909 to 1911, took over from his brother until his own death aboard the RMS Titanic in 1912.

Early in his childhood, Head's family moved from Stoke Newington to Stamford Hill where they inhabited a house decorated for them by William Morris. Henry had, by this time, attended two-day schools and he now enrolled as a weekly boarder at Friends' School, Grove House, Tottenham. It was here that he met his first mentor, Mr. Ashford, a master at the school. Head described Ashford as "one of the best teachers of natural science I have ever encountered." This was the man, he said, to whom he "[owed] the fact that [he] was firmly grounded in the elements of natural science at an age when boys at an ordinary school in my day were ignorant of its existence." Perhaps it is to Ashford that we owe the direction Head’s later studies took, though it is clear that Head had a natural propensity for scientific learning, even at this early age.

From preparatory school he went on to Charterhouse, which had recently moved from London to Godalming. Here he came under the influence of a second science master, W.H.W. Poole, who recognised his pupil's innate talents. Under Poole's guidance he was given a grounding not only in the prescribed Biology, but also elements of Physiology. He was also given private home tuition in dissection and cutting microscopic sections.

Having gained a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, the budding scientist decided to forgo his final term at Charterhouse in favour of foreign study.

Studying physiology and histology at Halle University in Germany and Head was soon proficient in the German language. Later in his life, Head would be repeatedly mistaken for a German at frontier posts due both to his aptitude for the language and his markedly Germanic physical appearance.

Looking at Head's life and the clearly scientific route that it took, it is often easy to forget that he was also to become a poet. Through his mother he had gained a love of literature and this would do much to direct his choice of acquaintances in later life when he was to become firm friends with authors (most notably to Thomas Hardy) and a mentor to the poet Siegfried Sassoon. This passion was also to initiate another, as in literature he and his future wife Ruth (a writer in her own right) were to find common ground.

Returning to England in time to go up to Cambridge where he made friends and acquaintances who would become distinguished in their own rights: D'Arcy Thompson, W.R Sorley, A.N Whitehead and William Bateson were among them.

Medical career

Head once stated that he could not recall a time in his life when he had not wished to pursue a career in medicine. He often thought that the dream of becoming a doctor could have first been formed at the age of eight when his family was involved in an epidemic of scarlet fever. He remembered being taken to spend a few days with the family doctor, Mr. Brett, and one morning at breakfast he startled his family by repeating a procedure that the doctor had used during his illness. Pouring a little tea onto a teaspoon, he had heated it over an oil lamp and carefully inspected the result, checking the tea for albumin as Mr. Brett had done with his urine.

Head left Cambridge with a first class degree in both parts of the Natural Science Tripos, and decided to travel abroad once more, this time to inspect laboratories in Germany. Dissatisfied with some that he visited, he decided to travel to Prague to visit Ewald Hering. He was immediately impressed, both by the facilities and the man and indeed the feeling seems to have been mutual as Hering invited Head to stay with him at once. In Prague, Head carried out work on the physiology of respiration and was given an account of his own researches in colour vision. Head would later pass on what he had learned about vision to his friend and colleague W. H. R. Rivers who came to be eminent in this field amongst others.

Head remained in Prague for two years, expanding his knowledge and his interests before returning to Cambridge to complete courses in anatomy and physiology and joining University College Hospital, London, where he was to qualify as a doctor in 1890. There he was house physician whilst also working under Dr. Thomas Buzzard at the National Hospital, Queen Square. His earlier experiences in Prague had created an interest in the physiology of respiration and he was later attracted to the Victoria Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, where he became a house physician.

While respiratory disease intrigued him, it is clear even from his earliest writings that his developing fervour was for neurology. His Cambridge M.D thesis 'On disturbances of sensation with especial reference to the pain of visceral disease,' was based upon patients Head had seen and was later published in Brain (Head, 1893). Which begins: "Several years ago I was led to examine the positions occupied by pain in disorders of the stomach and I soon came to the conclusion that the usual description was incomplete in several respects.... I then began to investigate the distribution of herpes zoster in the hope that a skin lesion which was notoriously of nervous origin might throw some light on the meaning and significance of the tender areas in visceral disease.... I next attempted to determine to what level of the nervous system these areas belonged, with the help of cases in which gross organic lesions were present.... This opened up the whole question of sensation in its various forms, but in this paper I shall not do more than touch upon the relations between the distribution of the sensations of pain, of heat, of cold and of touch." This early work on sensation was later to form the basis for one of his most ground-breaking studies 'A Human Experiment in Nerve Division.'

"Some men find teaching difficult: others are born teachers"

Russell Brain comments that while Head was a physician by profession, he was a born teacher. Appointed medical registrar to the London Hospital in 1896 and elected assistant physician four years later, there is a verbatim report of one of his rounds in 1900. On this day he showed the young men a patient with mitral stenosis, adherent pericardium and heart failure. Almost twenty years later, one of these young men (a Dr. Donald Hunter) recorded him as teaching on the difference between bronchial and cardiac asthma.

Head first showed his talent for teaching at the age of 21 when he addressed the Stoke Newington Mutual Instruction Society at the Friends Meeting House, Park Street, on the fertilization of plants. Professor H. M. Turnbull writes of Head's devotion to teaching:I had the good fortune when first going to the hospital to meet daily in the mornings on the steam engine underground railway Dr. Henry Head. He told me to buy Gee's little book on percussion, and kindly taught me throughout our journeys about physical signs, much to the annoyance of our fellow travellers; indeed in his characteristic keenness he spoke so loudly that as we walked to the hospital from St. Mary's station people on the other side of the wide Whitechapel Road would turn to look at us. I was greatly interested in the central nervous system when learning physiology and anatomy, and so I enjoyed greatly my three months as a clerk to him, his sessions in the out-patient department, and his wonderful demonstrations on clinical evenings. ... He devoted a great deal of time to teaching. In his rounds of the wards his clerks read the histories and examinations they had written, and he criticized even the English. He did not confine himself to nervous diseases, but took more pains than any other physician for whom I clerked to teach us physical signs and – how to examine patients of all kinds. He was a little too anxious to get exactly correct results when demonstrating to students; thus when he was mapping out areas of anaesthesia or hyperaesthesia the cottonwool, pin, etc., would pass more slowly, and the 'say when' would become a little more rapid and insistent, as the correct boundary was approached.

Head's unwillingness to be wrong was not always of benefit to him. One day a fellow of his, William Bullock, decided to test the extent of Head's 'omnipotence'. Asking the doctor at lunch whether he had read Hagenheimer's new book on locomotor ataxia. Head replied he had only had time to glance at it. Bullock commented, "Well, you have done better than the rest of us. There is no such book."

Henry and Ruth

Henry Head and Mary Ruth Mayhew (1866–1939), daughter of Mr. A.L Mayhew of Wadham College, Oxford, were married in 1904, seven years after having met.

They were an eminently well-matched pair. Both were unquestionably keen minded. Henry made every effort to be on equal terms with his wife; one prime example of this occurred in 1911 when, frustrated by his inability to speak French as well as his wife, he went to France for several weeks to remedy this. She too took an interest in everything that he did; as Gordon Holmes writes "she shared his interests, stimulated his enthusiasms, criticized his writings and relieved him of many of the petty worries of life."

Henry was a keen writer and on this too he and his wife shared common ground. Ruth was also the author of several books, including two novels ('Compensation' and 'A History of Departed Things'), a collection of the works of Thomas Hardy (with a foreword by her husband) and a translation of 'Der kleine Tod' ('The Little Death') by the German author Irene Forbes-Mosse. Often she published books as 'Mrs. Henry Head' and most of Head's poems are dedicated to his wife; 'Destroyers and other verses', for example, is inscribed 'To Her without whose touch the strings would have been mute'.

As close as they were, often their jobs kept them apart for long periods. Particularly at the start of their relationship they were able to see very little of each other. She had been an assistant mistress at Oxford High School and later became a headmistress in Brighton and his medical career had kept him in London. Even after their marriage they found it hard to spend time together as Head spent most weekends from 1903 to 1907 in Cambridge experimenting with Rivers. To cope with the long periods of separation, they started writing a joint diary and commonplace book. Each had a volume and they would exchange them from time to time so that they could comment on each other's experiences, thoughts and reading.

The one disappointment of their marriage was that it remained childless. Head adored children, as can be seen in his poems and his poetry also gives considerable insight into Head's great desire for a child of his own. In his poem "Long Ago I used to Pray", for example, he takes on the perspective of a woman yearning for 'the fierce joy of motherhood' and presents a sympathetic view of her plight. Head's deeply personal poems also could be said to suggest that Ruth had at some point been pregnant (maybe more than once) and perhaps even to term.

Regeneration

Henry and Ruth Head appear alongside Rivers in the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker, a name derived partially on the 'regenerating' of the minds of soldiers and the opinions of civilians in the First World War which takes place during the book and partially from Head's experiments with Rivers on nerve regeneration.

From the earliest stages of his career, Head had had a keen interest in sensation, especially in relation to the symptoms of clinical disease. He first looked at sensation through physiological eyes, using his training from Prague and Cambridge, but he soon became aware that psychological factors also had a major part to play.

The first piece he ever published was on the subject of pain and areas of abnormal sensibility and his observations were so accurate that these became universally known as 'Head's areas'.

Head thought it probable that sensation related to innervation of the skin, but there was no accurate knowledge of cutaneous distribution of afferent fibres which enter the spinal cord by each dorsal root and terminate in one spinal segment. To remedy this lack of understanding, Head chose to investigate the anatomic distribution of cutaneous disturbances caused by herpes zoster. A careful study with A.W. Campbell enabled him to demonstrate the zones of skin affected by disease and from this he could chart the cutaneous distribution of different fibres originating from cells of each ganglion and reaching the corresponding segment of the spinal cord.

From these investigations, Head and Campbell made two important discoveries. Firstly, they demonstrated the cutaneous distribution in man of each afferent root, a valuable aid to the localisation of diseases of the spinal cord and its roots. Secondly, they revealed the mechanism of 'referred pain' so often associated with visceral disease.

What they found was that many herpetic areas representing the peripheral distribution of single roots or individual sections of the cord, corresponded closely with areas of referred pain from diseases of different internal organs. This led Head to conclude that irradiation of abnormal afferent impulses produces a state of excessive irritability in the grey matter of the dorsal horn at the level which they enter it. As a result of this, impulses from the skin that pass through it are exaggerated or disordered so that a stimulus that would not usually provoke a painful reaction does so.

'To Courage, Seated'

During the First World War, Head treated patients with brain injuries in London. The war prompted Head to write poetry which was later published in 1919 in the volume Destroyers and Other Verses, it also brought him together with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was under Rivers's care. After Rivers's premature death in 1922, Head adopted the mentoring role that he had once occupied, comforting a distraught Sassoon with remembrances of their friend and reassurances that nothing mattered except life.

Shortly after the war as Head preceded his guest, Grantly Dick-Read, into the hospital dining room Read heard Head's shuffling footsteps. Head turned and said, "Ah I see I have taught you too well!" This marked the onset of Parkinson's symptoms which would lead him to retire from the hospital in 1919. It was Sassoon who suggested that the Heads go to live in Dorset as a neighbour of their mutual friend Thomas Hardy.

Throughout his illness, Head remained as mentally alert as ever. In 1921 he delivered a Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society on 'Release of function of the nervous system' and he continued to edit the medical journal Brain (which he had been doing since 1910) until 1925.

Head's 'complex personality', the vibrant mix between scientist and artist and his enthusiasm for all that he loved is something that never left him. He talked "equally readily on literature, art, music, the latest scientific achievements and the affairs of everyday life." Gordon Holmes recalled one occasion when he spent a few days in the country with Head. On one evening when they were playing bowls he began developing a theory on how greater accuracy could be obtained; the next day he heard him demonstrate to a chance acquaintance, who unknown to him was an authority on the subject, the architecture of an ancient cathedral, and that evening discuss an abstruse musical problem with an expert musician.

As Robert Nichols stated in The Times:Sir Henry possessed the fullest as well as the wisest mind I have ever known. It was no unusual thing to hear him in the course of one evening discourse on topics so various as: the influence of reasoning upon Goethe and Mozart, types of apprehension in listeners to symphonic music, sensations while looping the loop (he was over 60 when he did so), the painting of Guardi, 'co-ordination' in a star golfer, Ninon de Lenclos, Conrad as a narrator (Sir Henry was far the ablest literary critic I have ever known), religious ecstasy, the relation of art and science, the social customs of Melanesia. On each of such topics he not only appeared to have more information than anybody in the room, but spoke after a more illuminating fashion, for, like Leonardo (on whom he was an authority) he had a supreme eye for the significant. Nor did he resemble Leonardo in mind only. He had Leonardo's lofty human compassion, humility, patience, and profound serenity of spirit." (10 October 1940)