Volume 1

Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech / by Henry Head.

  • Henry Head
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech / by Henry Head. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    les plus variees, sont en partie decouvertes et ramenees a un principe general. Le nerf qui preside au mouvement, au sentiment et aux fonctions des sens, nait et se developpe d’apres les merries lois que Torgane au rnoyen duquel l’esprit sent, veut et pense. De quel interet et de quelle importance va devenir 1’etude du cerveau, main- tenant qu’il n’est plus condamne, comme autrefois, a etre simplement taille et en quelque sorte cisele comme une masse brute et sans but! Ce viscere ne presentera desormais plus de simples debris; Ton y verra partout une dis¬ position pour un but quelconque; partout des moyens d’influence reciproque, malgre la diversite la plus etonnante des fonctions. Toutes ces anciennes formes et ces connexions mecaniques se transforment aujourd’hui en une collection merveilleuse d’appareils materiels pour les facultes de Fame. De meme que Taction des differens visceres, et la sensation des differens sens se trouvent sub- ordonnees a un appareil nerveux particulier, de meme aussi chaque instinct, chaque faculte intellectuelle, se trouvent subordonnes dans Thomme et dans tous les animaux, a une partie quelconque de la substance nerveuse du cerveau. This remarkable memoir was handed over to a committee consisting of Tenon, Sabatier, Portal and Pinel with Cuvier as “rapporteur”; the result was the sort of half-hearted judgment that might have been ex¬ pected from men of such established reputation and public eminence. They allowed that the description of the grey and white matter was novel, and agreed that Gall and Spurzheim had overthrown the theory that all nerves descended from the “brain” (i.e. the hemispheres and basal ganglia). But they failed to appreciate the revolutionary significance of this new conception of the nervous system and damned it with faint praise, suggesting that what truth it contained was already familiar, whilst the rest was of doubtful value. Gall and Spurzheim responded by publishing in full their original memoir with comments on the report of the committee1. A year later (1810) appeared the first volume of the Anatomie et Physiologie du Systeme Nerveux en general et du Cerveau en particulier. Here they insist2 that man and the animals, whatever their respective faculties, are links in a chain of living beings. The human nervous system does not differ funda¬ mentally in structure from that of the beasts; its functions are identical in quality but more highly developed. How is it possible, they ask, to look on the brain as the seat of the faculties of the soul, if it is nothing but a secretory or excretory organ or is solely destined to secrete the principle of voluntary movement? It is impossible to explain the successive development, isolated activity and fractional diminution of the different 1 [52]- 2 [53]> Preface p. x.
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