The mental symptoms of brain disease : an aid to the surgical treatment of insanity, due to injury, haemorrhage, tumours, and other circumscribed lesions of the brain / by Bernard Hollander.

  • Hollander, Bernard, 1864-1934.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mental symptoms of brain disease : an aid to the surgical treatment of insanity, due to injury, haemorrhage, tumours, and other circumscribed lesions of the brain / by Bernard Hollander. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    there certainly was Milton, who was blind at an early age, bub what imagination can be stronger and more brilliant ? Beethoven was deaf while still a fairly young man; his deafness accentuated his natural disposition to suspicion, but he did not cease to compose music. Laura Bridgman, the blind deaf-and-dumb woman, was remarkably intelligent, and Miss Helen Keller, a similarly afflicted pupil of the Perkins Institution, has even taken the first piize at an examination in competition with normal girls, and has now become an accomplished authoress. Those who hold that knowledge results wholly from the experience of the individual, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and com- pletely constructed brain, their position would be less untenable. But as the case stands, the gradually increasing intelligence displayed throughout child- hood and youth is more attributable to the com- pletion of the cerebral organisation than to the individual experiences—a truth quickened by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed a high endowment of some faculty which, during education, was never brought into play. Doubtless, experiences gathered by the individual furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the organised and semi-organised arrangement exist- ing among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge