TIL: Walter Reed (as in the guy after whom Washington DC VA hospital is named) was a dick. He and several other medical researchers decided to study yellow fever. After the first attempt at studying it by infecting themselves proved too dangerous (one researcher died but Reed himself was never exposed), they turned to requesting volunteers from the army. Men were paid and promised medical care and a government pension should they survive the infection. The whole study was dubiously ethical at best.
The Wada test is used to determine left/right brain dominance with the speech and language centers of the brain. A drug called sodium amobarbital is injected in one carotid artery, silencing that hemisphere of the brain. The side that retains the most function when the test is done bilaterally, is dominant. For right-handed people it is the left brain 95% of the time; for lefties, the left brain is still more likely to be dominant but only 65% of the time. Dominance is important to establish when neurosurgery needs to be performed, in order to minimize damage to these important loci.
Broca (as in Broca's aphasia) proved that speech and language are localized in very specific centers in the brain. Prior to his discovery it was thought that these processes were processed diffusely throughout the cortices.
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