The Clinical Application of Electroencephalography

THE brain, like the heart, produces electrical waves during life. Caton, an English physiologist, was the first to measure these electrical potentials in the exposed brain of the rabbit (1875).1 It was not until 1929, however, that Hans Berger,2 a German psychiatrist at J ena, picked up electrical waves from the human brain by means of needle electrodes inserted into the scalp, and recorded them on bromide paper with a vacuum tube amplifier and a string galvanometer. Since that time a large group of workers have developed this new field in body current physiology--called electroencephalography-to a point where it is used as a diagnostic method in many hospitals in this country. The names of Berger and Kornmuller in Germany; Adrian and WaIters in England; and Gerard, Jasper, Gibbs, Davis, and Loomis in the United States are only a part of the large list of pioneer workers in this field. The reader is referred to the new and excellent Atlas by Gibbs3 and the extensive and complete review of this field by Davis4 and Jasper5 for details not covered in this article.