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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    lower part of his forehead; he showed impatience and indicated by gestures that his impotence of speech came from there. It was not his tongue which was embarrassed; for he moved it with great agility and could pronounce quite well a large number of isolated words. His memory was not at fault, for he signified his anger at being unable to express himself concerning many things which he wished to communicate. It was the faculty of speech alone which was abolished. This soldier was also unable to read or to write. Had Gall laid more stress on such cases, the history of aphasia would have been considerably advanced; but, although many instances came before him, he appears to have looked upon them as confirmatory of a localisation of faculties determined on other grounds1. For him normal speech was due to the perfect exercise of certain aspects of memory, each of which was situated in some particular part of the anterior lobes of the brain. He distinguished verbal memory, including the “sense of words and names,” grammatical memory with “talent for language and philo¬ sophy,” and the “sense of relation of numbers.” Man was also endowed with a sense of “locality,” of “colours” and of “tonic harmony and music.” The “organs” responsible for these “intellectual faculties” are situated in those convolutions of the brain which abut on the orbit and immediately adjacent parts of the skull. That is to say the faculty of normal speech depends upon the activity of the convolutions situated on the inferior aspect of the frontal lobes. This localisation was reached by fantastic deductions from portraits or casts of the skull of persons pre¬ eminent or deficient in certain mental characteristics. This insistence on the distinction between the various intellectual and moral faculties as the basis of the activities of the mind, led Gall to a complete misunderstanding of the nature of speech. He rightly took up the position that we do not think in words or signs; but on the other hand he made all such symbols depend immediately on one or more of the faculties he had described. Destul-Tracy2 had suggested that every sign is the expression of the answer to a complete calculation or analysis; it fixes and states this result in such a way that a language is in reality a collection of determined formulae, which in turn facilitate and simplify subsequent calculations or analyses. Gall, on the other hand, appears to have looked upon speech as the direct mechanical expression of the con¬ cepts, inclinations, feelings and talents of man, each of which he localised in a particular part of the brain. He cites his pathological cases to show 1 [53]> vol. IV> P- 79-. 2 Projet cTelements d}ideologic, chaps, xvi and xvii. Quoted in [53], vol. iv, p. 93.
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