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Commonplace book

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective.

Overview
"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means "a general or common place", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's example. "Commonplace book" is at times used with an expansive sense, referring to collections by an individual in one volume which have a common theme (e.g. ethics) or explores several themes. The term overlaps with aspects of the terms "anthology" or "mixed-manuscript" in these productions but most properly refers to a collection of sayings or excerpts by an individual, often collected under thematic headings.

Commonplaces are a separate genre of writing from diaries or travelogues. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts; sometimes they were required of young women as evidence of their mastery of social roles and as demonstrations of the correctness of their upbringing. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. As a genre, commonplace books were generally private collections of information, but as the amount of information grew following the invention of movable type and printing became less expensive, some were published for the general public.

In 1685 the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise in French on commonplace books, translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, "in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Following the publication of his work, publishers often printed empty commonplace books with space for headings and indices to be filled in by their users. An example is "Bell's Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke" which was published by John Bell almost a century after Locke's treatise. A copy of this blank commonplace was used by Erasmus Darwin from 1776 to 1787, and it was later used by Charles Darwin who called it "the great book" when composing his grandfather's biography.

By the early eighteenth century, they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations, and definitions. They were used in private households to collate ethical or informative texts, sometimes alongside recipes or medical formulae. For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book could be a repository of intellectual references. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713 and a typical example was published by Mrs Anna Jameson in 1855, including headings such as Ethical Fragments; Theological; Literature and Art.

Commonplace books were used by scientists and other thinkers in the same way that a database might now be used: Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today).

The commonplace system of categorized note-keeping was not restricted to books. In the twentieth century, Henri de Lubac traveled with his notes in a sack. Erasmus of Rotterdam traveled with a chest of notes, including examples of well-written Latin that formed the basis of his Adagia. In De Copia his Method of Collecting Examples (Ratio collegendi exampla) advocated a hierarchical but ad hoc breakdown of topics: for example, the top-level might be Piety and Impiety, under Piety might come Gratitude, and under these headings one puts example texts. The commonplace proper would be some simple aphorism or moral, possibly several, that can be drawn from the example, such as The crowd loves and hates thoughtlessly.

As a result of the development of information technology, there exist various software applications that perform the functions that paper-based commonplace books served for previous generations of thinkers.

Philosophical origins
Beginning in Topica, Aristotle distinguished between forms of argumentation and referred to them as commonplaces. He extended the idea in Rhetoric where he suggested that they also be used to explore the validity of propositions through rhetoric. Cicero in his own Topica and De Oratore further clarified the idea of commonplaces and applied them to public speaking. He also created a list of commonplaces which included sententiae or wise sayings or quotations by philosophers, statesmen, and poets. Quintilian further expanded these ideas in Institutio Oratoria, a treatise on rhetoric education, and asked his readers to commit their commonplaces to memory. He also framed these commonplaces in moral and ethical overtones.

While there are ancient compilations by writers including Pliny and Diogenes Laertius many authors in the Renaissance credited Aulus Gellius as the founder of the genre with his commonplace Attic Nights.

In the first century AD, Seneca the Younger suggested that readers collect commonplace ideas and sententiae as if like a bee and by imitation turn them into their own honey-like words. By late antiquity, the idea of employing commonplaces in rhetorical settings was well established.

Presumed to have been written in the fifth century Stobaeus compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies of excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of works of which only 315 are still extant in the twenty-first century.

In the sixth century Boethius had translated both Aristotle and Cicero's work and created his own account of commonplaces in De topicis differentiis.

Florilegium
By the eighth century, the idea of commonplaces was used, primarily in religious contexts, by preachers and theologians, to collect excerpted passages from the Bible or from approved Church Fathers. Early in this time period passages were collected and arranged in the order of their appearance in the works from which they were taken, but by the thirteenth century they were more commonly arranged under thematic headings. These religious anthologies were referred to as florilegia which translates as gatherings of flowers. Often these collections were used by their creators to compose sermons.

Early examples
Precursors to the commonplace book were the records kept by Roman and Greek philosophers of their thoughts and daily meditations, often including quotations from other thinkers. The practice of keeping a journal such as this was particularly recommended by Stoics such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, whose own work Meditations (second century AD) was originally a private record of thoughts and quotations. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a courtier of the tenth or eleventh-century Japan is likewise a private book of anecdote and poetry, daily thoughts and lists. However, none of these include the wider range of sources usually associated with commonplace books.

A number of renaissance scholars kept something resembling a commonplace book – for example Leonardo da Vinci, who described his notebook exactly as a commonplace book is structured: "A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat." French encyclopediast Jean Bodin used the commonplace book as "an arsenal of 'factoids'."

Zibaldone
During the course of the fifteenth century, the Italian peninsula was the site of the development of two new forms of book production: the deluxe registry book and the zibaldone (or hodgepodge book). What differentiated these two forms was their language of composition: a vernacular. Giovanni Rucellai, the compiler of one of the most sophisticated examples of the genre, defined it as a "salad of many herbs".

Zibaldone were always paper codices of small or medium format – never the large desk copies of registry books or other display texts. They also lacked the lining and extensive ornamentation of other deluxe copies. Rather than miniatures, a zibaldone often incorporates the author's sketches. Zibaldone were in cursive scripts (first chancery minuscule and later mercantile minuscule) and contained what palaeographer Armando Petrucci describes as "an astonishing variety of poetic and prose texts". Devotional, technical, documentary, and literary texts appear side by side in no discernible order. The juxtaposition of taxes paid, currency exchange rates, medicinal remedies, recipes, and favourite quotations from Augustine and Virgil portrays a developing secular, literate culture.

By far the most popular literary selections were the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Giovanni Boccaccio: the "Three Crowns" of the Florentine vernacular traditions. These collections have been used by modern scholars as a source for interpreting how merchants and artisans interacted with the literature and visual arts of the Florentine Renaissance.

The best-known zibaldone is Giacomo Leopardi's nineteenth-century Zibaldone di pensieri, however, it significantly departs from the early modern genre of commonplace books and is rather comparable to the intellectual diary which was practiced, for example, by Lichtenberg, Joubert, Coleridge, Valery, among others.

English
By the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions as Oxford. John Locke appended his indexing scheme for commonplace books to a printing of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The commonplace tradition in which Francis Bacon and John Milton were educated had its roots in the pedagogy of classical rhetoric, and "commonplacing" persisted as a popular study technique until the early twentieth century. Commonplace books were used by many key thinkers of the Enlightenment, with authors like the philosopher and theologian William Paley using them to write books. Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books at Harvard University (their commonplace books survive in published form).

However, it was also a domestic and private practice that was particularly attractive to authors. Some, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice more closely. The older, "clearinghouse" function of the commonplace book, to condense and centralize useful and even "model" ideas and expressions, became less popular over time.

Manuscripts

 * Adelaide Horatio Seymour Spencer, nineteenth-century gentlewoman. Held in the Franklin Library, University of Pennsylvania.
 * Glastonbury Miscellany. (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS 0.9.38). Originally designed as an account book.
 * Isaac Newton (1643–1727), mathematician and physicist. Held at the University of Cambridge, with a digitised version freely available to view online. He developed the calculus in a commonplace which he called his waste book.
 * Jean Miélot, fifteenth-century Burgundian translator and author. His book is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the main sources for his verses, many written for court occasions.
 * Loci communes (Pseudo-Maximus), a late ninth- or early tenth-century florilegium
 * Richard Hill, a London grocer (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354).
 * Robert Reynes of Acle, Norfolk (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 407).
 * Virginia Woolf, twentieth-century novelist. Some of her notebooks are held in Smith College, Massachusetts.
 * Zibaldone da Canal merchant's commonplace book (New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MS 327)

Published examples

 * Mrs. Anna Anderson, A Common Place Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies (Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1855)
 * W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) started a commonplace book in a journal in May 1928 as a medical student. He kept it for 44 years until his death at which point it occupied 25 volumes comprising 7,189 pages and was indexed with 1,600 index cards. The British Library created a digital archive of his commonplace which has been published online with extensive cross-linking based on his original index. http://www.rossashby.info/index.html
 * W.H. Auden, A Certain World (New York: The Viking Press, 1970).
 * Francis Bacon, The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, Longman, Greens and Company, London, 1883. Bacon's Promus was a rough list of elegant and useful phrases gleaned from reading and conversation that Bacon used as a sourcebook in writing and probably also as a promptbook for oral practice in public speaking.
 * Robert Burns, Robert Burns's Commonplace Book. 1783–1785. James Cameron Ewing and Davidson Cook. Glasgow : Gowans and Gray Ltd., 1938.
 * E.M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
 * The Houghton Club, which holds the fishing rights to more than a dozen miles of the river Test, kept a club commonplace book from 1827 - 1902, filled with manuscript text and drawings, with numerous letters and drawings by members tipped in. A limited edition facsimile was printed for members (London: Atelier Press, 2019).
 * Thomas Jefferson, Literary Commonplace Book (D.L. Wilson, ed., Princeton University Press, 1989)
 * Thomas Jefferson, Legal Commonplace Book (David Thomas Konig and Michael P. Zuckert, eds., Princeton University Press, 2019)
 * Ben Jonson, Timber; or, Discoveries, made upon men and matter, as they have flow’d out of his daily Readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the Times (London, 1641).
 * Transcribed by Bruce Sterling.
 * The Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Lyttelton (Cambridge University Press, 1919)
 * John Man, Commonplaces of Christian Religion (London, 1578)
 * John Marbeck, A book of notes and commonplaces…collected and gathered out of the works of diverse singular writers and brought alphabetically into order (London, 1581).
 * Philip Melanchthon, Loci communes, 1512 (Internet Archive)
 * John Milton, Milton's Commonplace Book, in John Milton: Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).  Milton kept scholarly notes from his reading, complete with page citations to use in writing his tracts and poems.
 * Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) kept a commonplace book with traditional commonplace headings and using index cards which "were kept in the plastic sleeves of a black photo album". They are held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Edited by his biographer Douglas Brinkley, his notes were published as the book The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom (Harper Collins, 2011).

Literary references to commonplacing

 * Amos Bronson Alcott, 1877: "The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson in the art of composition, an informal schooling for authorship. And were the process of preparing their works for publication faithfully detailed by distinguished writers, it would appear how large were their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces. How carefully should we peruse Shakespeare's notes used in compiling his plays—what was his, what another's—showing how these were fashioned into the shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, Montaigne, Goethe: by what happy strokes of thought, flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought forth! This were to give the keys of great authorship!"  Amos Bronson Alcott, Table-Talk of A. Bronson Alcott (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877), p. 12.
 * In Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes keeps numerous commonplace books, which he sometimes uses when doing research. For example, in "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger", he researches the newspaper reports of an old murder in a commonplace book.
 * In Alan Moore's graphic novel Providence, the protagonist Robert Black keeps a commonplace book; his entries into this book make up the second halves of the novel's chapters, contrasting with the graphic sections.
 * In Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events a number of characters including Klaus Baudelaire and the Quagmire triplets keep commonplace books.
 * In Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Count Almásy uses his copy of Herodotus's Histories as a commonplace book.
 * Virginia Woolf, mid-twentieth century: "[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink." Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library", Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf  (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958), p. 25.

Handbooks
Influential treatises, handbooks, and books in the history of the commonplace tradition.
 * Desiderius Erasmus, . Cologne, 1540.
 * Desiderius Erasmus, De ratione studii et instituendi pueros comentarii totidem. [Paris, 1512].
 * Henry Peacham, The garden of eloquence: conteyning the figures of grammar and rhetorick. London, 1577.
 * One of the first handbooks in English
 * Joachim Camerarius, Elementa rhetoricae. Basel, [1545].
 * John Brinsley, . London, 1612.
 * John Locke, . London, 1706.
 * Introduced a popular method for creating an index for commonplaces.
 * Obadiah Walker, . Oxford, 1673.
 * Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis.... In Rhetroica Philippi Melanchthonis. In Erasmi Roterdami libellum De duplici copia. Paris, 1542.
 * Philip Melanchthon, De locis communibus ratio. Augsburg [1593].
 * Philip Melanchthon, Institutiones rhetoricae. Wittenberg [1536].
 * Philip Melanchthon, Rhetorices elementa. Lyon, 1537.
 * Rodolphus Agricola, De formando studio. Antwerp, 1532; composed 1484.

title: Commonplace book


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Talk:Brainstem

Reference

 * The Emerging Mind; Vilayanur Ramachandran; Reith Lectures 2003.

This was a reference from the stub of this article.
 * \Bird/ 05:50, February 28, 2004 (UTC)

Anthoney-94
"A discussion of differences in the use of this term is presented in Anthoney-94" - what does this mean? It doesn't make any sense in context, not unless Anthoney-94 is metioned in the references which is not the case. / Habj 01:43, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

 * Good question. I couldn't find an Anthoney 94 on pubmed, so I did a Google search for "Anthoney 1994" and came up with the following reference which I'm pretty sure is the Anthoney-94 that the author of that statement intended. Neuroanatomy and the Neurologic Exam: A Thesaurus of Synonyms, Similar-Sounding Non-Synonyms, and Terms of Variable Meaning by Terence Anthoney. I'll go ahead and add it to the list of References. —Brim 09:07, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

 * It turns on that content was copied verbatim from BrainInfo in this edit. I have removed the paragraph, but added a link to the BrainInfo page. --Arcadian 19:38, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Reptilian Brain
The brain stem is often referred to as the Reptilian Brain, right? http://www.crystalinks.com/reptilianbrain.html Mathiastck 14:02, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Image
The Gray's anatomy image seems to show more than just the Brain stem which is confusing - it has the hippocampus, external capsule and caudate nucleus. Is there another Gray's anatomy picture that just has the brain stem? 194.83.140.31 10:34, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

This picture was in the section regarding the Trochlear Nerve: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Gray719.png I think it should be included in the main page on the brainstem. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.245.132.171 (talk) 13:34, April 4, 2007 (UTC)

 * I have updated the image to Gray719.png. --Arcadian 14:13, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Page name, Brain_stem or Brainstem?
In the body, the one-word brainstem appears to be used more than "brain stem", including for example the figure caption. A quick comparison on Google also suggests more hits for brainstem than "brain stem", so I wonder if the page name should be changed, and brain_stem redirected to brainstem rather than the reverse, as present? Ged.R 14:02, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Just wanted to say that this page is in SERIOUS NEED of adding of information. I plan to come back after my exam when I have some time and add on, but if anyone else can also help, that would be awesome. Kitra101 22:18, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Agree with the name change: "Brainstem" appears as a word inits own right in the Oxford English (sorry US friends) Dictionary. Is the term used in Gray's Anatomy and many other reference sources

Aside: I also agree about the time pressure of exams on medical students, maybe after we qualify, we can come back and improve on this. Dave Morgan 14:00 29 April 2007 (UTC)

I did a Google check myself, and using +brainstem and +"brain stem" produced nearly identical numbers. So, I'm going to say either way is correct, but make "brain stem" the standard for this article since that's the article's current title. If anyone disagrees, feel free to fix it, but this mixed usage has gone on for too long. -- Hi  Ev  16:16, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

 * I think brainstem is the proper term. You checked on Google, but lots of the sites tend to be laymen's sites so I think pubmed would be a better comparison and brainstem wins by 4 to 1 there. Further, many of the results for Brain stem are in triple compound words like brain stem cells. I've not seen a book that uses brain stem, though a minority of research papers and university sites do use it. I don't think its wrong per se but when more scientists prefer one of the terms then i think it should be changed. 83.146.14.209 (talk) 03:49, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Your probably right, but since brainstem redirects to this article, it's hard for me to get very excited about the issue. Looie496 (talk) 17:12, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

continuing
I checked PubMed again and queried specifically for "brain stem" vs. "brainstem" in title and abstract, only in top journals. Query used: "brainstem"[Title/Abstract]("CA: a cancer journal for clinicians"[Jour] OR "The New England journal of medicine"[Jour] OR "Science (New York, N.Y.)"[Jour] OR "Cell"[Jour] OR "Nature immunology"[Jour] OR "Nature"[Jour] OR "Lancet"[Jour] OR "JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association"[Jour] OR "Nature cell biology"[Jour] OR "Immunity"[Jour] OR "Cell metabolism"[Jour] OR "The Journal of clinical investigation"[Jour] OR "Nature neuroscience"[Jour] OR "Neuron"[Jour] OR "Stem cells"[Jour] OR "Cancer cell"[Jour] OR "Cell metabolism"[Jour] OR "Nature medicine"[Jour] OR "Genes & development"[Jour] OR "Journal of Clinical Oncology"[Jour] OR "Circulation"[Jour] OR "Gastroenterology"[Jour] OR "Molecular cell"[Jour] OR "Cell host & microbe"[Jour] OR "Current biology : CB"[Jour] OR "PLoS biology"[Jour] OR "Trends in neurosciences"[Jour] OR "Annual review of medicine"[Jour] OR "Annual review of physiology"[Jour] OR "Annual review of biochemistry"[Jour] OR "Annual review of microbiology"[Jour] OR "Annual review of genetics"[Jour] OR "Annual review of pharmacology and toxicology"[Jour] OR "Annual review of immunology"[Jour] OR "Annual review of public health"[Jour] OR "Annual review of neuroscience"[Jour] OR "Annual review of nutrition"[Jour] OR "Annual review of biophysics and biomolecular structure"[Jour] OR "Annual review of cell and developmental biology"[Jour] OR "Annual review of biophysics and bioengineering"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Drug discovery"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Genetics"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Neuroscience"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Cancer"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Immunology"[Jour] OR "Nature reviews. Microbiology"[Jour] OR "Blood"[Jour]) AND (("2000/1/1"[PDat]:"3000"[PDat])) RESULT: 'brain stem' was used 32 times including 5 review articles while 'brainstem' was used 144 times, including 32 review articles. In addition, when I checked the review articles in either Annual Reviews ___ or Nature Reviews ___, I saw a clear preponderance of the term 'brainstem' over 'brain stem.' Furthermore, even in articles that used 'brain stem' in the abstract and title, they used 'brainstem' more often in the main article.

On a separate note, I also found the term 'brainstem' used in Columbia med school lectures taught by Rafael Yuste (an HHMI investigator/neuroscientist) and Netter's books.

However, I DID find the term 'brain stem' used exclusively in UCSD's basic neurology course (which I am taking).

In conclusion, I believe brainstem is the correct term... can someone please change the title of the page to brainstem? Seunghwane (talk)

 * Okay, first, please don't use lines that look like "======..." as separators, the software interprets them as section titles and gets completely borked. Second, I'm fine with changing the title, and I doubt that anybody will have objections, but it's a pain in the butt to do.  Because brainstem is a redirect with a complex history, it can only be done by an admin, and needs to be requested at WP:RPM.  If you want to go through that process, I'll support you.  I don't really care enough to do it myself, honestly. Looie496 (talk) 21:30, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Midbrain before Pon
I exchange the order of the part of the brain stem. I think it is more logical to put the midbrain before the pons because it is the normal order if we start at the top of the brainstem.

Excuse my english, i'm a french canadian —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Medcin (talk • contribs) 01:01, 1 April 2007 (UTC).

Layman's Information
Just a suggestion from someone browsing through - while I'm sure this is very useful to the professionally-inclined, the page contains very little that's of use to the layman without much knowledge of anatomy. It's pretty highly technical. A description of the general location and function of the brain stem without resorting to medical terminology would be really helpful and informative. Right now, this entry reads like it was copied from a med school textbook - very useful to a few people, but not so much for the general population --Auric04 (talk) 21:22, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

 * I agree. The intro doesn't even mention what the brain stem does, it merely says where it's located and what it's made up of, which isn't particularly explanatory.  The article really needs to be rewritten for the layman.  I added a "cleanup-jargon" tag to the article based on this. --  Hi  Ev  16:31, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Reverted attempt to move page
Moving pages by copy-and-paste is not permitted because it removes the article history from the article, and produces a violation of the GFDL license. I explained above what you need to do to move the article -- you need to file a request at Requested page moves. There is no other way to do it. Looie496 (talk) 14:26, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

How many cranial nerves come from the brainstem?
This seems to be causing some difficulty. I don't know the official answer, but I do know that the olfactory nerve is not one of them, as it comes from the forebrain. I think the optic nerve should also not be included, as it comes from the diencephalon. The others come from the midbrain and hindbrain, so they should count. So it seems to me that the correct number should be 10. Looie496 (talk) 15:45, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
 * You are absolutely right, and I even found a source.  Lova Falk     talk   16:59, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Move to Human brainstem
Thanks for your edits to this project,. As you know we recently had an RfC on this matter with no consensus. There is a section in WP:MEDMOS that facilitates the coverage of animal anatomy in human anatomy-dominated articles; if we willy-nilly split articles we willy halve the editing and viewship of articles, impacting their future development for no real benefit; we have 4,500 anatomy articles probably 4, 450 about humans and it it would be very effort intensive and counterproductive to move the majority of these articles to "Human x" unless there is enough information on animals to support it. Cheers, --LT910001 (talk) 02:16, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Apologies for the move - I was not aware of any discussion on this I just referred to this talk page at the time where there was no mention made. I ought to read entries on Project Anatomy more. Had I known I would not have just gone ahead. Without ref to any other guideline the issue is very confusing or not made clear but that must have been a point raised. I"ll go back to read entries. Thanks Iztwoz (talk) 08:57, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

brain stem
confused, hmm I don't feel like it, I know what I want to say but it comes out completely something else. I dropped fish on the floor and I ask my child to pick up the cheese. I kept repeating the wrong thing and I don't know why I do this. it wasn't the first time either. just wondering what part of the brain controls the words coming out of my mouth — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.132.127.237 (talk) 02:00, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Interesting question, but this isn't the right place to ask it. Try the Science Reference Desk. Looie496 (talk) 02:34, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Broca's area, Wernicke's area and other portions of the temporal and parietal lobe. As said, this is the wrong place to ask.-- CFCF  🍌 (email) 07:39, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

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article is anthropocentric
Seems to be about human brainstems only. There are many other brainstems out there in nature. Pauldemello (talk) 06:05, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Typo
There is a typo in the "Structure" chapter, under the "Midbrain nuclei" section:

Midbrain nuclei
The midbrain consists of:

 * Periaqueductal gray: The area of gray matter around the cerebral aqueduct, which contains various neurons involved in the pain desensitization pathway. Neurons synapse here and, when stimulated, cause activation of neurons in the nucleus raphe magnus, which then project down into the posterior grey column of the spinal cord and prevent pain sensation transmission.

The sentence I undelined is missing a verb (probably "are"?). 37.162.132.219 (talk) 13:40, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

 * Copyedited per this request. -- Ancheta Wis   (talk  | contribs) 18:46, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Brainstem


text:
Manju

Manju may refer to:

 * Manchuria or Manju, a region of China
 * Manju or Manchu people, a people from Manju
 * Manju (era), a Japanese era name
 * Manjū, a Japanese confection
 * Manju (novel), an Indian novel written by M. T. Vasudevan Nair
 * Manju (film), a 1982 Indian film based on the novel

People with the given name
Manju is a predominantly feminine Indian given name, from Sanskrit mañju 'pleasant, sweet, snow, beautiful, clouds, morning dew'. People with this name include:
 * Manju Basu, Indian politician
 * Manju Bharat Ram (1945–2012), Indian educationist
 * Manju Bhargavi, Indian actress
 * Manju Borah (fl. 1999–present), Indian film director
 * Manju Dey (1926–1989), Indian film actress in Bengali cinema
 * Manju Kak (fl. 1992–present), Indian writer
 * Manju Kapur, Indian writer
 * Manju Malhi (born c. 1972), British-Indian chef
 * Manju Manikuttan (born 1976), Indian social worker
 * Manju Pathrose (born 1972), Indian actress
 * Manju Rani (born 1999), Indian boxer
 * Manju Rani (athlete), Indian track and field athlete
 * Manju Ray, Indian enzymologist and cancer biochemist
 * Manju Sharma (disambiguation)
 * Manju Sharma (biologist) (born 1940), Indian biotechnologist
 * Manju Swaraj (born 1982), Indian film director
 * Manju Qamaraidullāhī (1908–1983), Indian dramatist and poet
 * Manju Warrier (born 1978), Indian actress

title: Manju


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Butterfly McQueen

Butterfly McQueen (born Thelma McQueen; January 8, 1911 – December 22, 1995) was an American actress. Originally a dancer, McQueen first appeared in films as "Prissy" in Gone with the Wind (1939). She also appeared in the films Cabin in the Sky (1943), Mildred Pierce (1944), and Duel in the Sun (1946).

Often typecast as a maid, she said: "I didn't mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn't mind being funny, but I didn't like being stupid." She continued as an actress in film in the 1940s, and then moved to television acting in the 1950s. She won a 1980 Daytime Emmy Award for her performance in the ABC Afterschool Special episode "Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid".

Early life and education
Born January 8, 1911, in Tampa, Florida, Thelma McQueen was the daughter of Wallace McQueen, a stevedore/dockworker, and Mary McQueen, who worked as a maid. After her parents separated, Thelma lived with her mother in Augusta, Georgia, where she was educated by nuns at a convent. She had planned to become a nurse until a high-school teacher suggested that she try acting. McQueen initially studied with Janet Collins and danced with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. Around this time she acquired the nickname "Butterfly" – a tribute to her constantly moving hands – for her performance of the Butterfly Ballet in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Disliking her birth name, she later legally changed it to Butterfly McQueen. She performed with the dance troupe of Katherine Dunham before making her professional debut in George Abbott's Brown Sugar.

Career
McQueen was appearing as a student in the Broadway comedy What a Life in 1938 when she was spotted by Kay Brown, talent scout for David O. Selznick, then in pre-production for Gone With the Wind (eventually released in 1939). Brown recommended that McQueen audition for the film. After Selznick saw her screen test, he never considered anyone else and McQueen was cast in the role that would become her most identifiable – "Prissy", a simple-minded house maid. She uttered the famous words: "Oh, Miss Scarlett! I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!" Her distinctive, high-pitched voice was described by a critic as "the itsy-little voice fading over the far horizon of comprehension". While the role is well known to audiences, McQueen did not enjoy playing the part and felt it was demeaning to African-Americans. She was unable to attend the film's premiere because it was held at a whites-only theater.

She had an uncredited bit part as a sales assistant in The Women (1939), filmed after Gone with the Wind but released before it. She also played Butterfly, Rochester's niece and Mary Livingstone's maid, in Jack Benny's radio program in the 1940s. She appeared in an uncredited role in Mildred Pierce (1945) and played a supporting role in Duel in the Sun (1946). By 1947, she had grown tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her film career. During World War II, McQueen frequently appeared as a comedian on the Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast Jubilee. Many of these broadcasts are available on the Internet Archive.

From 1950 until 1952, she was featured (and briefly reunited with fellow Gone With the Wind actor Hattie McDaniel, who appeared in the first six episodes before withdrawing due to illness) in another racially stereotyped role on the television series Beulah, in which she played Beulah's friend Oriole, a character originated on radio by Ruby Dandridge, who took over the TV role from McQueen in 1952–53. In 1964 she starred alongside Marion Marlowe in the Off-Broadway commercial flop, The Athenian Touch. In a lighter moment, she appeared in a 1969 episode of The Dating Game.

McQueen was in the original version of the stage musical The Wiz when it debuted in Baltimore, Maryland in 1974. She played the Queen of the Field Mice, a character from the original L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, when the show was revised prior to going to Broadway, McQueen's role was cut by incoming director Geoffrey Holder.

Offers for acting roles began to dry up around this time, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including political study. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from City College of New York in 1975. McQueen played the character of Aunt Thelma, a fairy godmother, in the ABC Weekend Special episode "The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody" (1978) and the ABC Afterschool Special episode "Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid" (1979); her performance in the latter earned her a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming.

Her final feature film role was in The Mosquito Coast (1986). Her final appearance was in the TV movie Polly, a reimagining of the Pollyanna story with a Black cast.

Personal life
McQueen neither married nor had children. She lived in New York in the summer months and in Augusta, Georgia, during the winter.

A Democrat, she supported Adlai Stevenson's campaign during the 1952 presidential election.

In 1975, aged 64, McQueen received a bachelor's degree in political science from City College of New York.

In July 1983, a jury awarded McQueen $60,000 in a judgment stemming from a lawsuit she filed against two bus terminal security guards. McQueen sued for harassment after she claimed the security guards accused her of being a pickpocket and a vagrant while she was at a Washington, D.C. Greyhound bus terminal in April 1979.

Atheism
In 1989, the Freedom From Religion Foundation honored her with its Freethought Heroine Award. "I'm an atheist," she had declared, "and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I'm puzzled that so many people can't see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry."

She told a reporter, "As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion." This quote was used by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in advertisements inside Madison, Wisconsin, buses in 2009 and in an Atlanta market in 2010.

She lamented that, if humans had focused on Earth and on people, rather than on mythology and on Jesus, there would be less hunger and homelessness. "They say the streets are going to be beautiful in Heaven. Well, I'm trying to make the streets beautiful here ... When it's clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell."

Death
McQueen died at age 84 on December 22, 1995, at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, from burns sustained when a kerosene heater she attempted to light malfunctioned and burst into flames. McQueen donated her body to medical science and remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

title: Butterfly McQueen