On a case of amnesia and other speech defects of eighteen years' duration with autopsy / by H. Charlton Bastian.

  • Bastian, H. Charlton.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On a case of amnesia and other speech defects of eighteen years' duration with autopsy / by H. Charlton Bastian. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    In patients showing the degree of amnesia present in this case it has often been found that the auditory word- centre will respond to a strong stimulus coming to it from the visual word-centre,, as is shown by the fact that these patients are able to read aloud quite readily though their power of spontaneous speech is almost lost. The destruc- tion of the visuo-auditory commissure, however, made this achievement impossible in the case of Thomas Andrews. That the axidito-visual commissure was interrupted seemed shown by the fact that he could not write a single word from dictation,1 though he could copy any such word at once; and that he could even, on the last occa- sion of his being in the hospital, write “ boot ” on being shown that article. That he could write numerals from dictation and also name them at sight is difficult to under- stand. But a greater power of understanding, of naming, or of writing numerals, as compared with letters of the alphabet, has been very commonly met with in the inves- tigation of speech defects. The patient's greatest power of writing spontaneously In 1879 he could sometimes name the letters a and o correctly; in 1886 he sometimes named a, b, or c, and once or more named the short words “so,” “ goat,” and “ dogwhilst in this same year, when, as I have noted, he was at his best, he also succeeded in naming “pen,” “book,” and “pin,” when these common objects with short names were shown to him. There is, of course, the possibility that he may have been able to succeed to this extent by stimulating Broca’s convolution direct from the visual word-centre, thus avoiding the necessity for the passage of the stimulus by way of the visuo- auditory commissure to the auditory word-centre and thence on to Broca’s convolution. This more circuitous route is, as I believe, the rule in reading aloud and in naming at sight. The majority of writers on speech defects seem, however, to think that the more direct route is habitually followed by the stimuli concerned in the execution of these acts—a view that is not at all borne out by the case now under consideration. 1 His only achievements in this direction that have been recorded arc these. In 1879 he could sometimes write single letters from dictation, and generally single numerals. In 1886 he could write numbers with two figures, but not those with three, though he could rarely write letters from dictation other than a or b. In 1894 he could still write numerals, but not a single letter from dictation,