Paralyses, cerebral, bulbar and spinal : a manual of diagnosis for students and practitioners / by H. Charlton Bastian.

  • Henry Charlton Bastian
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Paralyses, cerebral, bulbar and spinal : a manual of diagnosis for students and practitioners / by H. Charlton Bastian. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    152/720 (page 128)
    Auditory Word Centre, and the revival of activity in them was fol- lowed by the production of Speech-movements in the ordinary way. In regard to some of the principal distinctions met with between different cases of Amnesia, a few general tentative remarks may here be made. In the slighter forms of Amnesia patients experience a difficulty in recalling the names of persons, places and things, or they misapply them. It is rarer to find such defects extending to substantives generally, and to other parts of speech. It is the most 1 special' associations which are the first to show signs of weakness or failure.. It is reasonable to suppose that the seat of all such associations would be in the Perceptive Centres. With other parts of speech the case may be quite different. As Broadbent truly observes (‘ Med. Chirurg. Trans.,’ 1872, p. 192), “ Words other than names, such as adjectives, verbs, etc., constituting the framework of a sentence or proposition, stand on a different foot- ing ; they are not associated with and tied down by visual, tactual, and other perceptions. Their use implies a previous knowledge of words as names, and marks a step beyond the act of naming They are not substantive intellectual symbols, but intellectual agents, instruments and products of intellect in action, not presentations impressed upon it. It is with respect to this class of words that it may be strictly said that 1 we think in words,’ for we often think [in part] in revived visual impressions not reduced in words. The convo- lutions concerned in their employment, will be such as are the seat of the intellectual operations.” Even though we do not quite agree with Broadbent in supposing that Intellectual Action'and its Centres can be so distinctly separated from Perceptive Action and its Centres; or, in regard to the divisions which he seeks to establish between these modes of activity ; or, with his explanation of the process of naming—still we cannot help think- ing that what he says above is very suggestive in regard to possible differences of seat in the organic substrata for Words, according as they do or do not denote external objects. It is reasonable to sup- pose that names of objects might be in more immediate relation with Perceptive Centres ; whilst general and abstract nouns and other parts of Speech would be much more intimately associated with regions where perceptive processes become merged into more complex, abstract, and strictly Intellectual Operations. If this distinction be a good and valid one, and if the inability to