No Necessity for Brains
No Necessity for Brains is an article published in the Weekly Dispatch on 21 december 1902.
No Necessity for Brains
At the dinner given by the Authors' Club to Mr. F. T. Bullen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told an excellent story of an English officer who was badly wounded in South Africa. The military surgeon had to shave off that portion of his brains which still protruded from the skull. The officer got well, and later on in London the surgeon asked whether he knew that a portion of his brains was in a glass bottle in a laboratory. "Oh! that does not matter now," replied the soldier, "I've got a permanent position in the War Office." This is as good in its way as Mr Coulson Kernahan's mot, that the commonest ailments of literary men are writer's cramp and swelled head, the first of which is unfortunately incurable, and the latter unhappily never fatal.
