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.

    21/576 (page 1)
    APHASIA AND KINDRED DISORDERS OF SPEECH PART I CHAPTER I FROM THE SCHOOLMEN TO GALL The evolution of our knowledge of cerebral localisation is one of the most astonishing stories in the history of medicine. Through¬ out the middle ages the brain was supposed to contain three ventricles, each of which was the dwelling-place of one or more aspects of the soul. The anterior chamber received the nerves of taste, smell, sight and hearing, and was the situation of the “ Sensus Com¬ munis”; in the middle ventricle dwelt the faculty of cogitation and reasoning, whilst the posterior one was the seat of memory1. This doctrine appears to have started from Herophilus and, although Galen placed the site of the activities of the mind in the substance of the brain, it persisted until it was rendered untenable by the dissections of Vesalius, in the early part of the sixteenth century. But theories continue to exert a subtle influence on medicine long after they have ceased to be reasonable; in 1798, Soemmering thought the seat of the soul was in the fluid which filled the ventricles, and even as late as 1844, the author of the article on psychology in Wagner’s Handworterbuch der Physiologie states that there are facts “which make it very probable that the cerebral ven¬ tricles are the organ which stands in the closest relation to conscious¬ ness2.” With the revival of learning the discussion of the relations between mind and body underwent a fundamental change. A return to the teaching of Aristotle that human reason depends on the senses and imagery made the existence of the mind dependent on bodily activities. This led to the conception that the soul in all its aspects, both higher and lower, was inseparable from the body and incapable of surviving its dissolution. Accurate anatomical knowledge acquired by dissection destroyed the fantastic dogmas of the Schoolmen about the ventricles, and attempts were made to bring the vital activities of the brain into harmony with the 1 [124], pp. 179-180, 204. 2 [128], p. 705.