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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    faculties, inclinations and feelings. The brain is the exclusive seat of the second group; moreover, these moral and intellectual dispositions are innate, contrary to the teaching of Locke. Volume hi did not appear till 1818. By this time Gall had parted from Spurzheim, who meanwhile had written a book on what he called Phrenology greatly to Gaiks annoyance. In the fourth volume1 Gall reveals the course of reasoning which led him to pitch on the anterior portion of the brain as the situation of the faculty of speech. He again tells the story of how he was sent in his ninth year to an uncle who was a cure in the Black Forest. Here he was educated with another boy of his own age who excelled him in learning his lessons. The two youths passed on to school at Baden, and Gall discovered that, when it was a question of learning by heart, he was beaten by those who were greatly inferior to him in written composition. Two of his new schoolfellows surpassed even his first companion in the ease with which they learnt by heart, and because they had large and prominent eyes (“yeux a fleur de tete”) they received the nickname of “Ox eyes.” Three years later at Bruchsal and again at the University of Strasbourg he continued to notice that those who learnt easily by heart had the same sort of eyes. He began to as¬ sociate this conformation with a good verbal memory, and so arrived at the conclusion that this faculty was situated in that part of the brain which lay behind the orbits. From such fantastic beginnings sprang the idea that the memory for words was situated in the frontal lobes. This was confirmed in his mind by subsequent cases of injury to these parts of the brain. Gall mentions an officer who received a sword thrust just above the eye, and another young man injured in the same situation by the point of a fencing foil; both had lost the “memory for words ” and could not recall the names of relatives or friends. But the following remarkable case2, which forms the first complete description of aphasia due to a wound of the brain, seems to have escaped the notice of medical historians. M. Edouard de Rampan was sent to Gall by Baron Larrey, Napoleon’s famous surgeon. He was 26 years of age and had received a wound from a foil, the point of which broke on the padded front of his fencing jacket. It entered the cheek in the middle of the left “ canine region ” close to the ala nasi and passed obliquely from below upwards and a little from without inwards. The instrument penetrated for a depth of about three inches and a half across the left nasal fossa and traversed the perforated plate of the ethmoid close to the insertion of the falx cerebri. It appears 1 [53], v°k IV> P- 68. 2 [53], vol. IV, p. 76, et seq.
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