Medicine: Pierced Brains

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A character in a current cinema (This Is the Night) boasts that he throws the javelin for both accuracy and distance. Accuracy has no part in the modern version of this ancient, useless sport.* Because of inaccurate javelin throwing, two youths last week had their brains pierced.

At Bowdoin College, Tapping S. Reeve, 20, of Detroit, a freshman, was throwing the javelin for practice. Modern javelins are straight wooden rods 8.5 ft. long, weighing 1.6 lb. They are tipped with steel. In making the throw the expert runs swiftly for a stretch, stops short and heaves the rod past his ear. In effect he makes a throwing sling of his entire body.

Tapping Reeve emulated as far as he could the 232 ft. 11⅝ in. accepted world record of Swedish E. H. Lundquist. Then, wearied, he walked across the athletic field. A javelin returned through the air struck him in the back of the head. It stuck there, quivering with the force of flight. The boy reached back and plucked the weapon from his skull, ran a quarter-mile to the college infirmary. From there he was transported to Portland. It seemed he would live.

Not so fortunate was Edward Allman, Passaic, N. J. high-school senior. He was watching some javelin throwers practicing. A random throw struck him in the forehead, pierced his brain. He died.

Often surprising are the brain's reactions to violent injury. A prize exhibit of Harvard's bright & cheery Warren Anatomical Museum, into which the public cannot get, is the Crowbar Skull. The foreman of a crew of Vermont road builders in 1848 let a charge of explosive detonate prematurely. The explosion drove a crowbar through the left side of his head. He was then 25, lived twelve years and nine months longer, showed no physical impediments, but did develop an abnormal truculence. The Museum has a plaster model of his head, and the actual crowbar.