Brain as an organ of mind / by H. Charlton Bastian.

  • Henry Charlton Bastian
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Brain as an organ of mind / by H. Charlton Bastian. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    703/762 page 685
    from a lesion altogether away from the third left frontal gyrus, if, as we at present suppose, the regions in which lesions have the greatest tendency to produce one or other of the forms of Amnesia should he situated around the posterior extremity of the left Sylvian Fissure. This may he easily understood. Suppose a person to be suffering from a defective activity of the Auditory Word- Centre, so that Names cannot be recalled ‘ voluntarily ’ or by ‘ association.’ There would already he great hesita- tions and difficulties in the expression of Thoughts, both in Speech and in Writing. But suppose this mere defec- tive activity to be replaced by actual destruction of the left Auditory Word-Centre, so that its functional activity became entirely lost: words could then, of course, neither be recalled ‘ voluntarily ’ nor by ‘ association ’; and still further, they could not be perceived and consequently could not be imitated. An individual thus affected would neither he able to Speak nor to Write, that is, he would be com- pletely Aphasic—with the superadded peculiarity that he would not readily comprehend spoken and perhaps written Language. The latter ability might persist to some extent, because the molecular equilibrium of the Auditory Word- Centre and of the related Visual-Centre of the opposite Hemisphere might not he sufficiently disturbed to prevent all apprehension of spoken or of written symbols. We might, in fact, have in such a case, the production of a complex Aphasic condition almost precisely similar to that met with in the girl whose case was recorded by Bazire, (p. 653) or even one like that recorded by the writer at p. 655, and yet such an Aphasic condition might have been caused by a lesion far away from the left third frontal convolution. And if this were so, such cases might have been quoted with much apparent effect against existing doctrines in regard to ‘ cerebral localization.’
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