The memory for words: Armand Trousseau on aphasia.

Of all the nineteenth-century physicians whose names still resonate today, Armand Trousseau is perhaps the one most familiar, for his description of carpal spasm as a sign of hypocalcemia (Trousseau's sign) and his description of the hypercoagulable state associated with cancer (Trousseau's syndrome). In the last three years of his life, Trousseau turned his attention to aphasia, which he included in his 1864 and 1865 lectures given at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Paris and which he discussed in an address to the Imperial Academy of Medicine in 1865. Trousseau preceded Wernicke in describing aphasia as a symptom complex, in which he included Broca's aphemia, receptive aphasia, the inability to read with and without the inability to write (alexia with and without agraphia), the inability to name common objects (amnesic aphasia or anomia) and to recognize numbers (acalculia), and the inability to draw. Trousseau concluded that such a varied symptomatology could not arise from a single area, and he proposed that lesions of the posterior inferior frontal convolution identified by Broca, of the insula and corpus striatum and of the temporal and parietal lobes, could give rise to aphasia. The role of the posterior temporal lobe in receptive aphasia was confirmed by Wernicke in 1874, and the role of the inferior parietal lobule in agraphia and alexia was confirmed by Dejerine in 1891. Trousseau thought that aphasia resulted from the loss of the memory for words and for the synergistic actions of the movements of articulations learned in early childhood. Trousseau added inattention, lack of comprehension, and cognitive decline to amnesia as contributing factors to the verbal and nonverbal expression of thought. Trousseau constructed a comprehensive theory of aphasia that unified its semiology, localization, and pathophysiology. This construct had the virtue of being predictive and falsifiable by the clinico-pathological method. Through insight born of observation, Trousseau identified the issues that dominated aphasiology into the twenty-first century.

Aphasia localization: was Pierre Marie right?

Language and its associated disorders have puzzled humanity since the dawn of civilization. The first descriptions of aphasia go back to classical antiquity. The Egyptians and Babylonians believed speech was a divine gift to mortals, and their descriptions of aphasia attributed these events to their Gods' anger and disfavour. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus and the Hippocratic Corpus report several aphasia cases, relating this phenomenology to apoplexy, epilepsy, and other illnesses.

Developmental Cognitive Deficits: A Historical Overview of Early Cases.

In this chapter, I will present an overview of early case descriptions of specific isolated cognitive deficits in children for which no clear brain impairment could be demonstrated and which were therefore considered to be congenital or developmental in nature. Three kinds of syndromes will be discussed. First, more general deficits like the attention and hyperactivity disorder and congenital aphasia will be presented. The second category relates to the more specific cognitive deficits, like developmental prosopagnosia, that have been reported, especially from the early 1980s onwards. In particular, early reports of specific congenital deficits in the areas of attention, language, perception, and memory will be presented. And finally, I will briefly discuss early case descriptions of individuals with autism and savant syndrome. Instead of suffering from a specific cognitive deficit, the latter show a special talent.

History of Amusia.

We live in a world surrounded by sound. Throughout life, we are exposed to music: from lullabies and songs taught at school to instrumental music both heard and played for pleasure. Every nation, along with its own language, has unique forms of music and dance. "Music knows no boundaries," as the saying goes. Just as language impairment is known as "aphasia," impairment of the perception of music is called "amusia." In this article, we will first classify the types of amusia. This will be followed by an introduction to the classical research of Salomon Eberhard Henschen (1847-1930), and to a discussion of higher auditory functions in which we highlight cases of amusia encountered in a person and through the literature.

[The "aphasia" article in Villaret's Handwörterbuch]. / Der Artikel "Aphasie" in Villarets Handwörterbuch.

Freud's authorship is founded on three arguments: 1) the reasoning of the article is close to Charcot's lectures which Freud had just translated; 2) there is a specific Freudian core thesis, common to the article and his later writings, namely the notion of an associative speech area extending between the "motor fields of the cortex and those of the optic and auditory nerves" and touching them like "corners" of a continuous field; 3) general observations on the revision or non- revision of articles taken over from the 1st to the 2nd edition of Villaret.

[Is Freud the author of the "aphasia" article in Villaret's Handwörterbuch der Gesamten Medizin (1888)? A reply to Anneliese Menninger]. / Die Frage der Autorschaft Freuds am Artikel "Aphasie" in Villarets Handwörterbuch der Gesamten Medizin. Antwort an Anneliese Menninger.

In 2011/12 Menninger rejected my proposition that Freud could not have composed the "aphasia" article in Villaret's medical dictionary. In this reply I argue in favour of my initial view that Freud is not the author of the article that has been attributed to him for over 60 years.

The Third Man: Robert Dunn's (1799-1877) Contribution to Aphasia Research in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England.

Throughout his medical career, Robert Dunn (1799-1877) published a number of clinical cases with postmortem reports involving acquired language disorders, with the first noted in 1842. He developed a physiologically informed approach to psychological function during the 1850s along with a group of notable colleagues Benjamin Collins Brodie, Henry Holland, Thomas Laycock, John Daniel Morell, and Daniel Noble. He was also active in ethnographic research on human origins and racial diversity. As such, Dunn represents an interesting player in the developing fields of neurology, psychology, and anthropology in England in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These various strands converged at the meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in 1868, where Dunn shared the program of lectures on the cutting-edge topic of aphasia with Paul Broca (1824-1880) and John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911). Dunn's ideas developed over a longer time frame than his younger colleagues and as such represent a unique blending of concepts from the earlier work of Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828) and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1798-1881) to the perspectives on language organization in the brain developed after 1861.

Charcot and aphasia: contributions of his assistants / Charcot e afasia: contribuições de seus assistentes

The ideas and concepts regarding language and its disorders have a longstanding history. However, it was possible to consider the 19th century as the period when the main milestones on the subject begun to be settled, with Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's pivotal findings. Albeit language disorders (aphasia) were not, apparently, his preferential interest, Charcot engaged himself in the issue, and after thorough studies delivered a series of lectures on this theme at the Salpêtrière Hospital, transcribed by two of his assistants, Charles Féré and Gaetano Rummo, and then published. Other three assistants, inspired in Charcot's teachings, Désiré Bernard, Gilbert Ballet and Pierre Marie, contributed independently with papers or books.The lectures and the contributions of those collaborators were partially incorporated in the Oeuvres Complètes published by Charcot.

As ideias e os conceitos sobre a linguagem e suas desordens possuemuma história de longa duração. Entretanto, é possível considerar o século XIX como o período no qual os principais marcos sobre o tema começaram a ser estabelecidos, com os achados fulcrais de Paul Broca e Carl Wernicke. Embora desordens da linguagem (afasia) não tenham sido, aparentemente, seu interesse predileto, Charcot se envolveu no assunto e, depois de aprofundados estudos, ministrou uma série de lições sobre o tema no Hospital da Salpêtrière, transcritas por dois de seus assistentes, Charles Féré e Gaetano Rummo, sendo publicados em seguida. Outros três assistentes, inspirados nos ensinamentos de Charcot, Désiré Bernard, Gilbert Ballet e Pierre Marie, contribuíram de modo independente com artigos ou livros. As lições e as contribuições desses colaboradores foram parcialmente incorporadas nas Oeuvres Complètes publicadas por Charcot.

Alexander Robertson (1834-1908): Glasgow's pioneer aphasiologist and epileptologist.

Alexander Robertson (1834-1908) was a Glasgow physician whose professional career was involved mainly with institutional-based practice but who published significant insights into the anatomical background to aphasia (1867) and the mechanisms of focal epileptogenesis (1869). His aphasiology ideas, including his suggestion that disconnection between cerebral centers involved in speech was responsible for the phenomenon, made him one of the earliest members of the late-nineteenth-century school of aphasia diagram makers. His view of epileptogenesis was that contralateral convulsing arose from irritation in a local area of pathology on the surface of the cerebral cortex after the irritation spread to a cortical motor center and then down the motor pathway to the striatum, while spreading within the cortex itself caused loss of consciousness. This interpretation contains much of the essence of the present-day understanding of cortical epileptogenesis. The origin of this interpretation is often attributed to John Hughlings Jackson, but Robertson published the idea in full a year or two prior to Jackson. However, Robertson's original insights were hardly noticed at the time they were published and have since almost entirely been ignored.

Singing by speechless (aphasic) children: Victorian medical observations.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, British clinicians made observations regarding the ability of individuals with impaired language abilities to sing or hum. One notable publication was of two cases of children briefly observed by John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) in 1871. These children were speechless but could produce some musical expression. Other such cases attracted the attention of Victorian clinicians who were actively pursuing theoretical questions regarding the organization of brain function and laterality. The presence of musical expression in children who failed to develop spoken language was seen as a notable symptom for early practitioners of pediatric neurology.

Some early cases of aphasia and the capacity to sing.

This chapter examines early cases of aphasia that include observations of the capacity to sing. Although the majority of these cases were published in the late nineteenth century, earlier reports exist and provide insights into the early thinking about the capacity to sing in aphasia, a topic that continues to the present day. The observation that some patients with aphasia and limited speech output were able to sing the texts of songs inspired scholars to examine the relationship between music and language. Early ideas about the capacity to sing were provided by well-known neurologists, such as John Hughlings Jackson and Adolf Kussmaul. The work of Herbert Spencer about the origins and function of music heavily influenced Jackson and others in their thinking about aphasia. This work also led to an increased interest in understanding music abilities in persons with aphasia and, later, in the brain mechanisms of music. The chapter provides a background as to why there was an interest in the capacity to sing in persons with aphasia and what influenced early thinking on this topic.

William Henry Broadbent (1835-1907) as a neurologist.

By the end of his career, Sir William Broadbent (1835-1907) had become an eminent London general physician who had been appointed Physician-in-Ordinary to King Edward VII and to the Prince of Wales. Previously he had been Physician-in-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. At earlier stages in his professional life, he had played a significant role in the development of clinical neurology in Victorian-era Britain. In 1866, he had enunciated a principle (Broadbent's hypothesis) that for the first time satisfactorily accounted for the mechanisms by which the trunk and bulbar muscles and the upper face were spared in hemiplegia. He had also carried out original investigations into the distribution of fiber tracts in the human cerebral hemispheres. At intervals over the years, he published on aspects of aphasia and developed a rather complicated though logical conceptual schema of the presumed anatomical background to the process of speech, based on clinic-pathological correlations. His role in all this neurological research and his other contributions on subjects such as neurosyphilis have largely been forgotten by subsequent generations.

Norman Geschwind and the use of history in the (re)birth of behavioral neurology.

When Norman Geschwind (1926-1984) attended medical school in the 1940s, his psychiatry professors taught as if behavior were unrelated to neuropathology. The focus of neurology remained the diagnosis and treatment of aphasias and epilepsies, while cognitive impairments and developmental disorders were classified as functional (psychological) disorders. Geschwind was troubled by the fact that many of the patients he saw with neurological deficits also presented with behavioral (developmental) disorders. Geschwind's generation also had been taught that aphasias resulted from global rather than localized or focal neurological lesions. These holists, including the prepsychoanalytic Sigmund Freud, targeted the work of aphasiologist Carl Wernicke as an exemplar of the flaws of the localizationist hypothesis. Reading Wernicke in the original, Geschwind discovered a complex and multilayered explanation for aphasias that implicated lesions located in association pathways that, when extensive, resulted in behavioral disorders. Geschwind also reread the works of the holists, discovering that, while their rhetoric rejected Wernicke, their explanations of aphasias actually reinforced Wernicke's hypothesis. Building on his reading of these historical documents and his clinical experiences, Geschwind urged the resurrection of Wernicke's disconnection syndromes that Geschwind labeled as Behavioral Neurology.

Aphasia secondary to tuberculosis: a review of a nineteenth-century case report by Booth and Curtis (1893).

The topic of aphasia secondary to tuberculosis deserves attention for two reasons: first, for better understanding rare etiologies of aphasia in medical history; and secondly, for initiating a multidisciplinary discussion relevant to aphasiologists, neurologists, pathologists, and clinicians generally. This article will focus on clinical observations of tuberculosis-related aphasia in the nineteenth century, highlighting a noteworthy case report presented by Booth and Curtis (1893).

[Macdonald Critchley].

In this paper, I review some of the writings of Macdonald Critchley with an accompanying biographical sketch. The contents of his first book, "Mirror-Writing" (1928) as well as those of "Aphasiology and other aspects of language" (1970), and his views on aphasia are presented. The book "Mirror-Writing" consists of a major review of mirror writing and related reversal phenomena. This monograph provides great insight on these symptoms, which are rare today. The ideas of Critchley on cerebral function and dysfunction (evolution and dissolution) substantially succeeded those of John Hughlings Jackson. Critchley's holistic view of aphasia is also briefly reviewed in this paper. The principal of Critchley's thoughts on neurological symptomatology is an interest in the origins of the brain, behavior, and language.

[Hirotaka Tanabe].

Hirotaka Tanabe was a Japanese neuropsychiatrist engaged in neuropsychological research on cerebrovascular disease and dementia. He contributed widely to the symptomatology of dementia, especially in the field of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). He focused on clarifying the clinical features of a language disturbance, termed Gogi-aphasia by Imura (1943), in 7 patients with anterior temporal circumscribed atrophy. He attributed the nature of Gogi-aphasia to a selective impairment of semantic memory for words and proposed that the pathological process of lobar atrophy with temporal predominance might affect the semantic memory system. In addition, he described in detail the behavioral symptoms of FTD. In his later years, he adovocated a neuropsychological approach to psychiatry.

Models of functional cerebral localization at the dawning of modern neurosurgery.

The concept of a functional cerebral localization gave the needed support for the development of neurosurgery as a specialty. It should be noted though that the presence of functions on discrete areas of the cortex was a very controversial topic at that time. The objective of this paper is to review models of cortical organization at the end of the 19th century, highlighting beliefs, theories, and controversies behind them. A better understanding of this historical moment is essential to appreciate the debate between holists and localizers that stirred neuroscientists worldwide in the first half of the 20th century.