Abstract
In 1784, Procháska,1 taking up the ideas of Willis,' divided the nervous system into sensorium commune (brain stern, spinal cord and nerves), and the rest of the brain as seat of the intellect. Since the brain was composed of such differently fashioned parts, he reasoned, it seemed that nature, which never acts in vain, chose, in differentiating these parts, to give them different functions as well.
Even if Gall had claimed to owe nothing to any of his predecessors, even if he had thought that he was starting from scratch, we would still have to place his work in the context of works near to his own time and a few decades previous to that, in order to be able to read him with any understanding.
Lanteri-Laura ([220b], p. 13)
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References
Jiri Procháska (1749-1820).
Willis: see [423a].
Soemmering: see note 56, p. 109.
Giovanni Battista Porta (1550-162?). After establishing the influence of affections of mind on the body, he indicates the signs by which the personalities of individuals can be recognized. Porta was inspired by Aristotle, Polemon and Adamantius.
Cornelio Ghirardelli, born towards the end of the 16th century.
Broussais recounts the example of the Marchese of Mascardi, Minister for Justice in the Kingdom of Naples, who applied Porta’s ideas to decide on the criminality of accused persons, based on an examination of their physiognomy ([220b], p. 24).
Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801).
Gall: see note 60, p. 110. In spite of his unscientific flights of imagina-tion, he was a great anatomist: “Gall’s research on the formation and structure of the brain has been the starting-point for persevering work which in many ways has brought results of great importance and which has in particular enabled us to know better the conditions of form and structure with regard to the cerebral convolutions.” ([300b], p. 685).
Pierre Marie (1853-1940).
Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1888), founder of the Société, Journal and Ecole d’Anthropologie.
See [220b], p. 194.
The essential object is the study of the brain; the skull is only a secondary object ([220b], p. 104).
According to Gall and Spurzheim ([143], vol. IV, pp. 68ff.). Note that the essentials of Gall’s doctrine are to be found in [142d], which Gall published alone after his break with Spurzheim.
Rolando: see p. 109, note 53 ([347b])
F.A Longet (1811-1871).
AL. Foville (1789-1878).
Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). La Physiologie du Goût dates from 1825. Balzac (1799-1850) wrote La Physiologie du Manage in 1829.
We find in ([142d], vol. III, pp. 145f.): “I owe almost all my anatomical discoveries to my physiological and pathological ideas; and it was only following on these latter that I was able to convince myself of the perfect concordance of moral and intellectual phenomena with the material conditions of their manifestation.”
Spurzheim, G.: see p. 110, note 61.
i.e. [143].
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).
Pierre François Gonthier Maine de Biran (1766-1824).
See [220b].
See note 22. The paper entitled “Observations on the organic divisions of the brain” originated as the inaugural lecture of the medical society. It was first known under the title “Observations on Dr Gall’s system”.
Jean Cruveilher (1791-1874).
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832).
Pierre Flourens: p. 108, note 26.
Louis Pierre Gratiolet (1815-1865).
See [117].
Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802).
Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881).
See [127a,b].
See [347a].
Augustin Serres (1786-1868).
See [127a,b,c].
Nicolas Saucerotte (1741-1814).
Philippe Pinel (1745-1826).
Pierre Marie: see note 9 above.
He had some difficulty accepting the dissociation of the brain into specialized zones, and admitted being completely hostile to phrenology ([285], p. 16).
Gabriel Andral (1797-1876). In his Clinique of 1834, he had pointed to the coincidence of unintelligibility of speech and babbling with right hemiplegia by lesion localized in the left corpus striatum. See Moutier ([285], p. 15).
Bulletin de l’Académie de Médecine, IV, pp. 282-328.
ibid., 1848, 1ertrimestre, pp. 699-719.
Simon-Alexandre Ernest Auburtin (1825-1893).
See note 10 above.
F. Lallemand (1790-1854).
See [163b].
See note 40.
Louis Léon Rostan (1790-1866).
Jean Pierre Frank (1745-1821).
Jacques Lordat (1773-1870) of the Montepellier Medical School. On July 17,1825 a chronic sore throat triggered the attack which for weeks deprived him of speech and reading.
See [395].
We must mention here, as a source of documentation, the article by Riese [343a].
Moutier ([285], p. 16) mentions Lordat’s book L’Analyse de la Parole (1823). In fact Lordat published, or rather authorized his student Kühnholtz to publish his lectures from the course in physiology from the academic year 1842-43, under the title “Analysis of speech, to serve the theory of various cases of alalia and paralalia (mutism and imperfections of speaking) which nosologists have failed to recognize”, in the Journal de la Société de Médecine Pratique de Montpellier VII, pp. 333-353 and 417-433; VIII, pp. 1-17 (1843). This is also the view of Quercy and Bayle (see [24]).
Benton [29b], like Riese (note 52), emphasizes Lordat’s influence on Dax Sr. and Jr. The father, Marc Dax, a doctor in Sommières, has presented a communication to the Medical Conference in Montpellier in July 1836; in this communication he established a relationship between forgetting the signs of thought and lesions of the left hemisphere. Marc Dax even noted that this observation had been made by Schen-kius.
The patients Broca concerned himself with were practically hopeless cases where speech had almost completely disappeared.
“When I wished to glance at the book I was reading when my illness had struck, I found myself unable to read the title” [243].
See note 53.
“The difficulty increased rapidly, and, in the space of 24 hours, I found myself deprived of the value of almost all words. Though there were a few left to me, they were becoming almost useless, because I could no longer remember the way to coordinate them in my mind so that they could express a thought…” [243].
“…For all that, it was necessary to‘corporify’ all the ideas in my mind; as a result, to exercise memory, to recall to mind the ideas of sounds; that could only be done with efforts that tired me for a long time, and which have never ceased to be a burden to me” [243]
See ([24], p. 300, n. 1): “Language is a pananthropic function.”
As we know, this preoccupation with thought and language has turned out to be a focus for 20th-century linguistic debate.
See p. 109, note 55.
See [220b], pp. 114f.
See p. 108, note 26. Flourens ([127e], p. 251) himself refers to [127d].
See p. 110, note 62. The work cited here was published in Heidelberg in 1821.
See p. 110, note 63.
See note 28 above.
Claude Bernard (1813-1878).
See p. 107, note 3.
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795-1876).
The achromatic microscope was gradually developed from lenses used for telescopes. Its aim was to eliminate chromatic aberrations from the image by using prisms.
Gabriel Gustav Valentin (1810-1883).
Jules Gabriel François Baillarger (1806-1891).
See p. 58, note 16.
See note 55, p. 109.
Indeed Malpighi had suggested that the “conduits” of white matter were connected with the “glands of the cortex”.
Robert Remak (1815-1865) identified myelinated fibre, which Leeuwen-hoek and Fontana may have seen.
Rudolf A. von Koelliker (1817-1905).
See p. 107, note 8.
See [276] and [277a,b].
See note 77.
It is perhaps of interest to point out that there may be correlations between the myelination process and speech and language development. See [225].
Rudolf Berlin (1833-1897).
Theodor Meynert (1833-1892).
Vladimir Alexewitsch Betz (1834-1894).
Eduard Hitzig (1838-1907) and Gustav Theodor Fritsch (1838-1927): the names of these two physiologists are linked as a result of their experiment in electrical stimulation of the canine brain.
See [337].
Jan Evangelista Purkyne (1787-1869).
See note 70.
Theodor Schwann (1810-1882).
Adolf Hannover (1814-1894).
See note 78.
Koelliker presents his point of view in [210c], but he had already done so in his communication [210a].
Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters (1834-1863).
Anastomosis is the contact of two blood vessels, arterial or lymphatic, and by extension between two conduits of similar nature, such as two nerves.
Rudolf Johann Wagner (1805-1864).
Joseph von Gerlach (1820-1896).
Camillo Golgi (1843-1926).
See pp. 182ff.
See [256].
See p. 109 note 40.
Johannes Müller (1801-1858).
See p. 112, note 95.
See p. 113, note 98.
Du Bois-Reymond: see [108b].
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894).
Ludimar Hermann (1838-1914)
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Bouton, C.P. (1991). Illusions of Science. In: Neurolinguistics Historical and Theoretical Perspectives. Applied Psycholinguistics and Communication Disorders. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9570-0_9
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