BELL, Sir Charles, K.H

BELL, Sir Charles, K.H., an eminent anatomist, physiologist, and surgeon, son of the Rev. William Bell, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, was born at Edinburgh in November 1774. Having studied at the High School and university of that city, he devoted himself at an early age to the study of anatomy, under his brother Mr John Bell, who was twelve years older, and who had already laid the foundation of his fame as an anatomist and a surgeon. Under the guidance of this enlightened teacher, Charles Bell soon gave evidence of the talents which seem to have been inherited by every member of his family. While yet a pupil, he published the first volume of his System of Dissections, illustrated by engravings from his own drawings. On the 1st August 1799, he was admitted a member of the College of Surgeons, and consequently became one of the surgeons of the Royal Infirmary; for all the members of that college were then in rotation surgeons of the hospital. His knowledge of anatomy, and the admirable use of his hands, exhibited both in his dissections and his drawings, were already conspicuous; and his operations were dis-

tinguished by their dexterity and simplicity. He eagerly availed himself of the opportunities afforded by his attendance in the infirmary to improve his knowledge of pathology, and, with that view, invented a method of representing morbid parts in models, some of which are still preserved in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. About this time a controversy arose respecting the medical attendance in the Royal Infirmary, which terminated in the exclusion of several of the surgeons, amongst whom was Charles Bell. In 1804 he offered to pay £100 a-year, and to transfer for the use of the students the museum he had collected, on condition that he should be "allowed to stand by the bodies when dissected in the theatre of the infirmary, and to make notes and drawings of the diseased appearances;" but this proposal was rejected. In 1806 he removed to London, where he immediately commenced a course of lectures on anatomy and surgery, and rapidly rose to distinction.

Previous to his departure from Edinburgh he had written his work on the Anatomy of Expression, which was published shortly after his arrival in London, and immediately attracted attention. Both as an artist and as a physiologist he had felt the want of some philosophical explanation of the rationale of expression; of those muscular movements which are the natural external indications of the passions and emotions of the mind; and perhaps no other man was so well qualified to supply the deficiency. But he did not confine himself to the illustration of what is useful to the artist; he also explained how an acquaintance with the anatomy of expression might be available to the surgeon or the physician in distinguishing the nature and extent of some important diseases. Independent of its intrinsic merit, this work has another interest; for there is reason to believe that his inquiries into the functions of the nerves in connection with the anatomy of expression led him to prosecute those investigations which terminated in the most remarkable anatomical discovery of our time.

In the same manner as it had been taught before the discoveries of Harvey, that there was a flux and reflux of the blood in the arteries and veins, so it was taught, before the discoveries of Bell, that the same nerves transmitted the mandate of the will from the sensorium to the organs of voluntary motion, and likewise carried to the sensorium intelligence of the condition of their extremities or sensation; and that, in some mysterious manner, these two impulses might be simultaneously communicated along the same chord in opposite directions, without impairing the efficiency of either. This doctrine, which now appears to be startling, continued to be taught, or was left to be inferred, by every anatomical teacher in Europe for at least a year after Sir Charles Bell had announced—in letters still extant, and bearing the London and Edinburgh post-marks of the 5th and 8th December 1807—his ideas on the nervous system. To him we owe the discovery that no one nerve serves the double purpose of ministering both to motion and to sensation;—that the spinal nerves and the fifth nerve of the brain, which had been regarded each as one nerve, consisted each of two distinct nerves connected with different portions of the brain, inclosed in one sheath for the convenience of distribution, but performing different functions in the animal economy, corresponding with the different portions of the brain to which they could be traced—the one conveying the mandates of the will from the sensorium, the other conveying to the sensorium intelligence of the condition of distant parts or sensation;—that, as the arteries carry the blood from the heart, and the veins carry it to the heart, so one set of nerves carries the impulses of volition from the brain, and another carries the impulses of sensation to the brain;—that the brain is divided, together with the spinal marrow which is prolonged from it, into separate parts, ministering respectively to the distinct functions of motion and sensation;—and that the

Bell. origin of the nerves from one or other of these sources seems to endow them with the particular property of the division whence they spring. Such were the leading features of Bell's great discovery, the greatest in the physiology of the nervous system for twenty centuries, and one of the most remarkable that the history of anatomy has to record.

For this discovery the Royal Society of London awarded him the first annual medal given by George IV. in 1829; and when a new order of knighthood was instituted on the accession of the late king to the throne, Bell was amongst the first who were invested. This was the only public reward he received, and he had merited it by the services he rendered to the wounded after the battles of Corunna and Waterloo, if he had never rendered any other. On both of these occasions he had proceeded to the scene of action, relinquishing for the time his professional avocations in London.

Of his various writings on the practice of different branches of his profession, it is sufficient to say that they place him in the highest class of our writers on surgery. But there is another series of his works, which, of all his labours, afforded him the greatest pleasure. In his treatise on animal mechanics, written by desire of the Society for Propagating Useful Knowledge, he embodied the substance of some of his lectures on the evidences of design to be found in the anatomy of the human body, which had attracted admiring crowds to the College of Surgeons. These views had been deeply impressed upon his mind, and the success with which he illustrated them probably pointed him out to the executors of the late Earl of Bridgewater as a fit person to maintain a part in that great argument which it was the purpose of that nobleman's bequest to have published. Sir Charles's contribution was the admirable treatise on the Hand. Still following out this favourite subject of his contemplation, he associated himself with Lord Brougham in the illustration of Dr Paley's Natural Theology, published in 1836, and contributed some of the most interesting of these illustrations.

This most estimable and distinguished man died suddenly on the 29th April 1842, at Hollow Park, in Worcestershire. (J. M.—LL.)