Brain as an organ of mind / by H. Charlton Bastian ; with 184 illustrations.
- Henry Charlton Bastian
- Date:
- 1882
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Brain as an organ of mind / by H. Charlton Bastian ; with 184 illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.
649/757 page 652
![suited about his leases, contracts, &c.; and his son stated to me that his father indicates perfectly well by gestures which are understood by those habitually around him, when certain portions of the deeds do not please him, and that he is not satisfied til] alterations are made, which are, as a rule, useful and reasonable.” Although his sight was good he could not read, or at least under- stand the sense of what he read; he listened with pleasure, however, when he was read to. He could not put together loose letters of the alphabet, nor write with his left hand. “After dinner,” Trousseau says, “ I tried to make out liowfar he could give proof of intelligence.* As he always answered ‘ Yes,’ I asked him whether he knew how that word was spelt, and on his nodding assent I took up a large quarto volume, with the following title on its back : ‘ History of the Two Americas,’ and requested him to point out the letters in those wo^-ds which formed the word ‘ Yes.’ xllthough the letters were more uhan one-third of an inch in size, he could not succeed in doing as I wished. By telling him to seek for each letter in turn, and by calling out its name, he managed after some hesitation to point out the first two, and was very long in finding the third. I then asked him to point out the same letters again, without my calling them out first, but after looking at the book attentively for some time, he threw it away with a look of annoyance, which showed that he felt his inability to do as I wished him.” It has often happened to him to say a word which he has not uttered for a very long time, as if an old impression were revived in his brain. Some time ago he dropped his handkerchief, and as a lady near him picked it up and gave it to him, he said to her, “ Thanhs 1 ” in a loud and distinct voice. His friends were de- lighted at this, and thought that he had recovered his speech. He was asked, implored, to say the word again ; it was repeated to him several times, but all was in vain, he never could succeed : and this was the general rule, he could not even repeat the simplest sound ivhich had been uttered before him. He told his age correctly in a most remarkable way, with his fingers. * What follows, however, is rather to be regarded as evidence bearing upon the functional activity of his Visual Word-Centre, which was very defective. It constitutes no measure of the degree of the patient’s intelligence, since this (as shown by a previous paragraph) was well preserved.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2805961x_0650.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
