On aphasia, or loss of speech in cerebral disease / by Frederic Bateman, M.D.

  • Frederick Bateman
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On aphasia, or loss of speech in cerebral disease / by Frederic Bateman, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    century, believed the choroid plexus was the organ destined to secrete the animal spirits, that the fourth ventricle was the seat of nien>oiy, and that the habitation of the soul was in the aqueduct of Sylvius; a century later Eene Descartes assigned to the soul a more secure position in the pineal gland. In later times, the brain has been universally con- sidered to be the organ of thought and intelligence, but opiaions have been and are still divided, as to whether it is to be regarded as a single organ, or as consisting of a series of distinct organs, each endowed with a special and independent function—whether, in fact, the phenomena of intelligence are due to an action of the brain as a whole, or whether the dif- ferent psychological elements which constitute them are connected with isolated and circiunscribed parts of the ence- phalon.'^ Out of the last theory has arisen the principle of the local- isation of the cerebral faculties, which was first annotmced in a definite form by Gall, who divided the encephalon into organs endowed with primordial faculties, distinct the one from the others. The germ of this idea of the poly section of the encephalon is to be found in the writings of physiologists long before the time of Gall; indeed, one writer, Charles Bonnet, assigned a special function to each fibre, stating that every faculty, sensitive, moral, or intellectual, was in the brain connected to a bundle of fibres, that every faculty had its own laws which subordinated it to other faculties, and deter- mined its mode of action, and that not only had every faculty its fasciculus of fibres, but that every word had its own fibre! The circimistance which directed Gall's attention to the possibility of connecting the brain with certain faculties of our mental natiu-e is so well known that I scarcely need allude to it. In his early days, he often found himself siu-- passed by certain of his fellow students whom he felt were intellectually inferior to himself, but in whom a remartable memory coincided with a striking prominence of the ocular globes. This external prominence led him to the inference that there was an; intemal^cerebral prominence which pro- duced it, and it was the application of this reasoning to other cranial]^ protuberances that gave rise to his craniological doctiine. * Those who may desire more detailed information as to the various theories of the sent of speech which were in vogue before the time of Gall, I would refer to an extremely interesting series of papers now being published by Dr. Hunt m the Anthropological Review.