He calls attention to the fact that the scrofulous and rachitic diatheses in childhood are sometimes accompanied by this disorder.
Winslow notes that in the incipient state of the brain disease of early life connected with fevers, disturbed conditions of the cerebral circulation and vessels, and in affections of advanced life, there is often witnessed a remarkable exaltation of the memory, which may herald death by apoplexy.
"Not only has the institution of intelligence in idiots dated from falls upon the head, but extra mentality has been conferred by such an event Pritchard tells of three idiot brothers, one of whom, after a severe head injury, brightened up and became a barrister, while his brothers remained idiotic.

'Father Mabillon,' says Winslow, 'is said to have been an idiot until twenty-six years of age, when he fractured his skull against a stone staircase.

He was trepanned.

After recovering, his intellect fully developed itself in a mind endowed with a lively imagination, an amazing memory, and a zeal for study rarely equaled.' Such instances can be accounted for by the brain having previously been poorly nourished by a defective blood supply, which defect was remedied by the increased circulation afforded by the head-injury.
"It is a commonly known fact that activity of the brain is attended with a greater head-circulation than when the mind is dull, within certain limits.

Anomalous development of the brain through blood-vessels, affording an extra nutritive supply to the mental apparatus, can readily be conceived as occurring before birth, just as aberrant nutrition elsewhere produces giants from parents of ordinary size.
"There is but one sense-defect in the child Oscar, his eyesight-absence, and that is atoned for by his hearing and touch-acuteness, as it generally is in the blind.