Departures of note

In April 1903, Henry Head had two cutaneous nerves in his left forearm surgically divided so he could study how sensation returns after nerve injury. Over the next four years, he travelled to Cambridge every weekend to sit with his eyes closed while his collaborator, psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, charted the recovery of feeling in his arm. The experiments revealed two distinct systems of cutaneous sensibility—a protopathic system for pain and extreme temperatures, and an epicritic system for fine touch and precise localisation—and showed that the protopathic system recovered first.

Head was born in Stoke Newington in 1861, the eldest of eleven children in a Quaker family. After studying physiology in Germany and Prague, he qualified as a doctor in 1890 and worked at University College Hospital and the National Hospital, Queen Square. His early clinical work on pain in visceral disease led to the identification of 'Head's areas', zones of skin whose sensitivity corresponds to disease of specific internal organs, and he later mapped the cutaneous distribution of spinal nerve roots through a study of herpes zoster with A. W. Campbell.

Head's self-experimentation was part of a broader career in neurology. He studied the grouping of afferent impulses within the spinal cord, worked with G. Riddoch on reflex activity in soldiers with spinal gunshot wounds during the First World War, and edited the journal Brain from 1910 to 1925. After retiring in 1919 due to the onset of Parkinson's disease, he combined his clinical knowledge with his own experience of progressive disability to write Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech (1926), a two-volume study of speech disturbances following brain injury.

Head was knighted in 1927 and received an honorary fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1929. He died in Reading in 1940, eleven months after his wife Ruth, and his ashes were scattered at Reading Crematorium. He left his legacy to the Royal Society to support the advancement of medicine in England.