Mixed language dominance: insights from a case of unexpected fluent aphasia with semantic jargon resulting from massive left perisylvian lesion.

We report a right-handed patient with a massive lesion in left perisylvian language cortex, who unexpectedly presented with fluent aphasia with semantic jargon. Language deficits were assessed with a comprehensive battery of language tests. Comprehension, naming, reading, and writing were severely impaired, and verbal expression was moderately fluent with semantic jargon. Although the patient's lesion included brain areas typically essential for motor speech coordination, he was neither nonfluent nor apraxic. He exhibited strikingly unexpected aphasia with semantic jargon and prominent comprehension deficits, suggesting that this is a case of mixed dominance: the right hemisphere likely controls motor speech and basic syntactic skills, while the severely damaged left hemisphere controls semantic processing, predictably severely impaired.

Eighteenth century classification of mental illness: Linnaeus, de Sauvages, Vogel, and Cullen.

Classification was an important aspect of the 17th and 18th century development of Western science, epitomized by Linnaeus's 1735 Systema Naturae (Nature's System), in which he divided each kingdom of nature into classes, orders, and species. Linnaeus, a physician in addition to being a renowned taxonomist, endeavored to classify all known human diseases, largely on the basis of symptoms, in his 1759 Genera Morborum (Varieties of Diseases). We focus on his classification of mental disorders, a large subset of the Genera Morborum. We compare and contrast the Linnaean system with François Boissier de Sauvages's 1772 Nosologie méthodique (A Systematic Nosology) and Rudolph Augustin Vogel's 1764 Generum Morborum (Varieties of Diseases). We consider the impact of these nosologies on William Cullen's (1769/1800) Nosology, a popular system of disease classification that persisted through much of the 19th century.

History of aphasia: A broad overview.

This chapter gives a broad overview of the description and theorizing of a wide range of language disorders resulting from brain damage, commonly classified under the umbrella term "aphasia." It covers works written in Antiquity up to the 20th century. Moreover, it looks at disturbances in various language modalities such as speech, language comprehension, reading, writing, and sign language. In addition, also forms of the more recently discovered primary progressive aphasia are discussed. Finally, important developments in the history of assessment and rehabilitation of language disorders are described. To properly characterize disorders of language, these developments are discussed from the perspectives of neurology, psychology, and linguistics.

Johann Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695): A review of his contributions to neuropsychology on the quadricentennial of his birth.

The effects of brain damage on behavior have been reported by authors from the Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century medical traditions. However, few of the reported cases discussed mind-brain relationships, even fewer reported data that offered a description of cognitive functions, and none described a clear association of a functional mechanism of cognitive impairment with identifiable focal brain damage. An exception is found in the case studies by Johann Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695). After reviewing the pre-seventeenth-century background and Wepfer's milieu, we analyze his texts on neuroanatomy, apoplexy, and brain vascularization (Observationes anatomicae ex cadaveribus eorum, quos sustulit apoplexia cum exercitatione de ejus loco affecto) and his remarkable collection of 222 neurological cases (Observationes medico-practicae de affectibus capitis internis & externis), posthumously published in 1727. We focus on his reports concerning on the presence of aphasia, memory disorders, and unilateral neglect, correlated with focal brain damage, with particular emphasis on his examination of language impairments.

La Revanche de Gall.

Discusses a poem by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), "Craniology," which is a paradigmatic example of parodying psychological faculties for being material things. Franz Joseph Gall's (1758 -1828) term for organology was schädellehre, a German compound from schädel (skull, cranium, or pate) and lehre (teaching or doctrine). Craniology was used by some of Gall's followers, but mostly his critics; phrenology was coined in 1815 by Thomas Forster. In "Craniology," his Horatian-exemplar poem, Hood ridicules Gall's materialism. The present author notes Gall's idea that there were both intellectual and emotional faculties, which resonates well with contemporary cognitive neuroscience models of the mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

On Italian and English sonnets.

Presents a poem entitled An Ode to HE. HE refers to Hans Eysenck, and the poem is a Petrachan sonnet. The poem muses on the recent retraction of papers written by Eysenck; the volta in Italian ("turn of thought" or "change of argument") should be self-apparent without counting the lines. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Poetry corner: Personality assessment scales: Psychometric and poetic.

The formal structure of both the sonnet and haiku present a dichotomous frame that the reader is invited to interpret in Likert-scale fashion. Included is the author's contribution to this tradition, which, were it to be translated into an MMPI-2 question, might contribute to Scales 2 (Depression) and 10 (Social Introversion). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The split between Gall and Spurzheim (1813-1818).

An acerbic footnote in Volume 3 (1818) of the five-volume great work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular with Observations on the Possibility of Understanding the Many Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Man and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads, marked the end of the collaboration between Gall, the founder of organologie, and Spurzheim, promoter of phrenology. We discuss the background of this note and the nature of the rift that marked the end of Gall and Spurzheim's collaboration.

On the origins of organology: Franz Joseph Gall and a girl named Bianchi.

Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) introduced a new theory of mind and brain at the end of the eighteenth century, which he referred to as organology, dealing with mental functions and their cortical localizations. Gall wrote that observations regarding the verbal learning capacities of his schoolmates brought about his new way of thinking. This widely accepted view, however, requires qualification. Although Gall's experiences and observations as a schoolboy were relevant, especially for his craniology, these childhood memories might have been recalled and reinterpreted after he had started to think about the faculties of mind-specifically after he had met Bianchi, a 5-year-old girl with a special talent for music.

Franz Joseph Gall and music: the faculty and the bump.

The traditional story maintains that Franz Joseph Gall's (1758-1828) scientific program began with his observations of schoolmates with bulging eyes and good verbal memories. But his search to understand human nature, in particular individual differences in capacities, passions, and tendencies, can also be traced to other important observations, one being of a young girl with an exceptional talent for music. Rejecting contemporary notions of cognition, Gall concluded that behavior results from the interaction of a limited set of basic faculties, each with its own processes for perception and memory, each with its own territory in both cerebral or cerebellar cortices. Gall identified 27 faculties, one being the sense of tone relations or music. The description of the latter is identical in both his Anatomie et Physiologie and Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties, where he provided positive and negative evidences and discussed findings from humans and lower animals, for the faculty. The localization of the cortical faculty for talented musicians, he explained, is demonstrated by a "bump" on each side of the skull just above the angle of the eye; hence, the lower forehead of musicians is broader or squarer than in other individuals. Additionally, differences between singing and nonsinging birds also correlate with cranial features. Gall even brought age, racial, and national differences into the picture. What he wrote about music reveals much about his science and creative thinking.

Phrenology and physiognomy in Victorian literature.

Phrenology evolved from the work of Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), becoming a fixture in Victorian culture, arts and letters as well as medicine. Writers such as Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and Thomas Hood (1799-1845) initially satirized phrenology, as did playwright and composer William S. Gilbert (1836-1911). On the other hand, novelists such as Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), George Eliot (1819-1880), and the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) not only accepted the principles of this brain-based personality theory but exploited it in their characters. The popularity of phrenology in the Victorian period should in part be attributed to the popularity of physiognomy which, thanks in large part to Johann Christian Lavater (1741-1801), has been thoroughly embedded in Western culture since the end of the eighteenth century.

Neurologic heuristics and artistic whimsy: the cerebral cartography of Wilder Penfield.

Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield played a singularly important role in expanding our knowledge of functional neuroanatomy and neurophysiology in the twentieth century. Trained under Charles Sherrington, William Osler, and Otfrid Foerster, Penfield was an early leader in efforts to map the cerebral cortex via direct electrical stimulation of the brain. In 1937, Penfield introduced an entirely new concept for illustrating the relative sizes and locations of discrete functional regions within the sensorimotor cortex--the homunculus-to exemplify the "order and comparative extent" of specific functional regions. Over the subsequent two decades, Penfield and colleagues introduced several more "little men" to portray the functional maps of other important brain structures (i.e., supplementary motor area, insular cortex, thalamus). These later homunculi were more crudely drawn, and Penfield referred to them as essentially heuristic devices. The actual intent in producing these homunculi remains uncertain, and despite the extraordinary impact of these artistic renderings on the field, the question is raised as to whether the allure of the artwork seemed to wrest control from-and then to guide-the dissemination of science, rather than the other way around.

Chapter 36: history of aphasia: from brain to language.

An historical overview is presented that focuses on the changes both in approach and topics with respect to language disturbances due to brain lesions. Early cases of language disorders were described without any theorizing about language or its relation to the brain. Also, three forms of speech disorder were distinguished: traulotes, psellotes and ischophonia, which are only marginally related to aphasia. In the 18th century some authors, in particular Gesner and Crichton, attempted to explain language disorders in terms of mental processes. The great debate on both the anatomical (Broca, Wernicke) and functional (Wernicke, Lichtheim) aspects of aphasia dominated late 19th century discussion of localization of function, leading to the development of what we now call the cognitive neurosciences. In this period, language processing was described in terms of a simple functional model of word recognition and production; linguistic principles played no role. At the beginning of the 20th century the discussion on language disorders waned due to a decrease of interest in the issue of localization; aphasia became primarily a clinical issue of how best to classify patients. In the second half of the 20th century, the field of aphasia developed rapidly due to studies performed at the Boston Aphasia Unit and, more importantly, to a change of orientation to linguistic notions of language structure, as introduced by Chomsky.

The diagnostic and statistical manual: historical observations / Manual diagnóstico e estatístico: observações históricas

A variety of social, political, and economic factors influenced the creation of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952. Subsequent to DSM-I, cultural, medical, and economic factors shaped each successive version of the DSM; we discuss some of the more prominent controversies these editions have generated. Publication of the DSM-5 in May 2013 sparked a new round of debates concerning the possible impact on patients and society as a whole.

Uma variedade de fatores políticos e econômicos influenciou a criação do primeiro Manual Diagnóstico e Estatístico de Transtornos Mentais (DSM), em 1952. Após o DSM-I, fatores culturais, médicos e econômicos formataram as versões sucessivas do DSM; discutimos algumas das mais prominentes controvérsias geradas por essas edições. A publicação do DSM-5, em maio de 2013, levantou um novo ciclo de debates relativos ao possível impacto nos pacientes e na sociedade como um todo.