Electroencephalography in Health and Disease

All living tissues possess electrical properties which can be studied and the brain is no exception. Electroencephalography is one of the methods of study of this electrical activity of the brain. Caton, an -Englishman, in 1874, discovered evidences of electrical activity in the brains of animals. With the advent of Einthovan string galvanometer in 1906, it was possible to record the electrical activity of the brain. Hans Berger of Germany, the father of electroencephalography, began his studies of the electrical activities of brain in man in 1925. Before his death in 1941, he had placed clinical electroencephalography on solid footing. Adrian and Mathews were the first in England to publish confirmation of Berger's findings and they called this activity ' the Berger rhythm'. In 1934, in the United States, Hallowed Davis and Frederic Gibbs at Harvard and Herbert Jasper at Providence, Rhode Island, began their work in this field. Gibbs suggested the possibility that patients during minor epileptic seizures might have unusual discharges from the brain. In England in 1936, Grey _ Walter applied the technique for the localization of the slow waves found in tumours so that they could be located on "the surface of the scalp with a reasonable amount of accuracy. Travis working in Iowa showed that the E.E.G. pattern of a subject remained constant from day to day and week after week. From 1937 onward E.E.G. laboratories began to come into existence as an integral part of the neurological unit in various hospitals. The armed services began to make use of this procedure in 1941, just before the last war. Since the war, a number of societies, devoted to this work, have been started. At the moment there are several of them, the American, the French, Swiss, Danish, Italian and others. The Journal of Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurology, an international quarterly,