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Item does not contain fulltext 328 p.

Item does not contain fulltext Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) viewed himself as a cutting-edge scientist, whose broad goals were to understand the mind and brain, and to be able to account for both group and individual behavioral traits in humans and animals. Starting in Vienna during the 1790s, he argued for many independent faculties of mind (e.g., music, calculation), ultimately settling on 27, with 8 being unique to humans. At the same time, he became the first person to provide evidence for cortical localization of function, the idea that the cerebral cortex is composed of specialized functional areas or organs, as he preferred to say. But although he utilized many acceptable methods in his multifaceted research program (e.g., dissections, studying people with brain damage, and observing behaviors over a lifetime), his doctrine was highly controversial from the start. For scientists and physicians, this was largely because he made cranioscopy his primary method, believing cranial bumps and depressions faithfully reflect the cortical organs and could be correlated with specific behaviors. In this book, Gall is shown to be a dedicated scientist with brilliant insights: a free-thinking naturalist of the mind and a visionary of the brain, yet a researcher with faults. Despite being frequently portrayed as a charlatan or comical figure, the authors also show how what others called his "phrenology" (a term he abhorred) helped shape the modern neurosciences and other disciplines. Maintaining that Gall’s impact deserves more recognition today, this book provides a fresh look at the man, his objectives, and his revolutionary doctrine. 564 p.

Item does not contain fulltext 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. 29 p.

Item does not contain fulltext 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.

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Romantic operas provide a useful tool for historians to understand the perception of some medical disorders that existed during the nineteenth century. Somnambulism was still a mysterious condition during this time, since its pathogenesis was unknown. Hence, it comes as no surprise that somnambulism features in a number of operas, the best known of which are Verdi's ‘Macbeth' and Bellini's ‘La Sonnambula', both the subject of recent scholarship. Here we examine a more obscure opera in which sleepwalking is depicted. Dating from 1824, ‘Il Sonnambulo' by the Italian composer Michele Carafa is based on a libretto by Felice Romani. Although it shares some features with the Verdi and Bellini operas, it also presents original elements. Our analysis of this forgotten opera supports the contention that studying operas can shed light on medical theories and practices, and on how ideas about mind and body disorders were transmitted to the laity in times past.