The disorders of speech.

  • Wyllie, John, 1914-
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disorders of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    312/520 (page 296)
    Case XI. (Bernard, De I'Aphasie, p. 159).—A woman, aged 49 treated by Charcot in the Salpe'triere Hospital. Six years before coming under observation, she had one morning awoke from sleep hemiplegic and aphasia Two years after this, she had been able to acquire only the power of saying yes and no. At first, the aphasia had been both sensory and motor, so that the patient had been Word-Deaf as well as Aphemic. She had been able to under- stand only a few of the words spoken to her, and these only after they had been several times repeated. Words spoken had seemed to her only an indistinct noise, like conversation in a crowd. She could not say precisely how long this word-deafness had lasted, but it had disappeared much sooner than her motor aphasia. Little by little she had recovered from the motor aphasia also, so that when, in 1883, she came under the care of Prof. Charcot, her speech had for some years been thoroughly restored. She was admitted into the Salp<3triere on account of an intercurrent affection unconnected with the brain or speech, viz., an obliteration, by thrombosis, of the abdominal aorta ; and of this she died in a few days. On autopsy, it was found that, on the left side of the brain, both the Broca's convolution and the first temporal convolution had been completely destroyed by old softening. Besides illustrating the possibility of recovery from an aphasia that is both motor and sensory, this case shows that, in the process of recovery, the education of the uneducated centres is easier and more rapid in the case of the auditory than in that of the motor centre. Summary of Leading Features. In now summing up the leading features of auditory aphasia it may be said that— 1. It is rarer than motor aphasia. 2. It is more easily curable. 3. It interferes with both the reception and the production of audible speech,—its leading symptoms being, on the reception side, Word-Deafness, and, on the production side, Amnesia Verbalis, Paraphasia, and Articulative Amnesia. 4. It interferes with the Piepetition or Echoing of spoken words. Though the words are heard by the uneducated auditory centre,