The insanity of genius and the general inequality of human faculty, physiologically considered / by J.F. Nisbet.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The insanity of genius and the general inequality of human faculty, physiologically considered / by J.F. Nisbet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    some 10,000 separate characters have to be learnt and re- membered. The nerve-groupings in connection with lan- guage generally will T^e much greater than this, though their intimate association with each other will cause them to be easily revived. In language, as in our acquisitions generally, the various centres act and re-act upon each other. The student will frequently remember a word by sight, that is to say, by its place in some printed page, when his auditory centre is powerless to recall it. It is also a common experience that a fact read in a book is forgotten, but remembered if we make a note of it. The reason is that, in the latter case, two centres instead of one are brought into play; a double memory is established, that of sight and that of muscular movement. It is like the tying of the knot on the handker- chief. Letters, especially initial letters, cohere in the memory independently of words. Hence, a person may recognise individual' letters when whole words are Greek to him. W. W. Ireland knew an aphasic patient who could not read written-out numbers, such as ' thirty-seven' or the corre- sponding Eoman numerals ' XXXVII,' but who could read the ordinary figures ' 37,' while perfectly understanding all that was said to him. His age was 32 ; when this was written 42, he corrected it. Applying the same principle to the malady called agraphia, many things that perplexed the wisest of our forefathers become as clear as day. A woman, who has somehow lost the faculty of writing, consults a specialist. He asks her to write her name. She takes a pen, and in all good faith scribbles:— Sunnil Siclaa Satreni, adding by way of an address, Sunesr nut ts mer tinn lain. The defect here is similar to the misuse of words in speech. There is something wrong with the nerve-groupings and their connections employed in the movements for writing. As in the case of speech, the defect may be great or small. Some- times a patient can begin writing a word correctly, but