Isolation of the Speech Area

Abstract

The credit for discovering this remarkable patient and for studying her so carefully over many years goes to Dr. Fred Quadfasel, who also demonstrated her remarkable capacity for verbal learning. Without these astute clinical and experimental observations the subsequent post-mortem findings would have been of little use. Combining the two, however, made it possible to draw far-reaching theoretical conclusions from this experiment of nature. Perhaps the most important conclusion is that comprehension of language is not unitary. Thus this patient could complete common phrases, and could perform other discriminatory activities, while she failed at others. This conclusion is reinforced by other findings, e.g., some patients with severe comprehension deficits for questions and commands for the individual limbs may yet respond very well to commands carried out with the axial musculature, e.g., ‘sit down’, ‘stand up’ ‘walk’, etc.