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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    movements of which speech is composed; or what is probably the same thing, sometimes on a lesion of the grey, and at others of the white matter of the anterior lobes. Loss of speech does not necessitate want of movements of the tongue considered as an organ of prehension, mastication, deglutition of food; nor does it necessitate loss of taste. Many nerves have their origin in the brain itself, or rather communicate with it by anastomotic fibres ; for example, the nerves animating the muscles, which combine in the production of speech, arise from the anterior lobes or at any rate possess the necessary communications with them. In the same year (1825) he published the Traite clinique et physiologique de l\Encephalite1, selecting from Magendie the motto “La pathologie est la physiologie de l’homme malade.” Given the symptoms it is the busi¬ ness of the physician to discover the site of the malady; for it is evident that, if the functions are known, their disturbance will indicate some change in the organ which brings them into being. With this aim in view he narrates a series of cases of cerebral disease, attempting to show that the symptoms differ according to the site of the lesion. He devotes his attention to disorders of motion, of sensation and of the intellectual functions, particularly speech; but it is in the deductions he draws from various cases of motor paralysis that he is most original and approximates most closely to modern conceptions. He contends2: The plurality of the cerebral centres devoted to motion is proved by the existence of partial paralyses, corresponding to a local lesion of the brain; for it is evident that if the brain were not composed of many centres, motor or conductors of muscular movement, it would be impossible to conceive how the lesion of one of those parts could bring in its train paralysis of a given portion of the body, without in any way affecting the movements of all the other parts. Commenting on one of his cases, followed by an autopsy, he suggests that isolated paralysis of the arm is associated with a lesion of the pos¬ terior aspect of the middle part of the opposite cerebral hemisphere. “ Should this turn out to be a constant phenomenon, we must conclude,” he says, “that this limb receives from this point in the brain the principle of voluntary movement.” He lays down clearly the difference between higher or voluntary, and lower or automatic acts3. The brain as the organ of the intelligence and centre of the will, is the nervous force which holds in dependence intellectual movements, that is to say, those the animal executes by virtue of intellectual acts; consequently, a lesion of this organ will paralyse more or less completely the movements of this order and 1 fa]- 2 f13]> P* 279* 8fa]>P-28°-
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