Osservazioni cliniche ed anatomiche nella storia della neuropsicologia del linguaggio: gli studi pre-Broca

Clinical and Anatomical Observations in the History of Neurolinguistics: Studies Predating Paul Broca – Classical neurological and neuropsychological handbooks usually cite Paul Broca’s communication on the frontal lobes as the seat of articulated speech (1861) as the starting point in the history of the study of aphasia as. In their seminal study, Benton and Joynt (1960) have collected numerous observations of aphasic patients from the Greek, Latin Medieval and Renaissance medical tradition and from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature. In none of the reported cases, however, were the crucial elements of aphasia, that is, is, on the one hand the distinction between language deficits, conceptual damage and speech disorders and, on the other hand, the association with lesions of the left brain hemisphere – clearly identified. The first part of this article describes the work of Johannes Schenck and Johannes Jakob Wepfer, two medical scientists in the six-teenth and seventeenth century, whose studies are almost entirely unknown. Johannes Schenck (1530-1598) completed a collection of clinical observations including both reports from antiquity and from his contemporaries. In his first volume (Observationes medicae de capite humano, Basel, 1584) he considers the major diseases of the head and face. At least 16 of these observations refer to patients with aphasia. Johannes Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695) published several texts on neuroanatomy, brain vascularization and apoplexy. He gathered a collection of neurological cases (Observationes medico-practicae de affectibus capitis internis & externis), which was published posthumously. At least 15 of the 222 observations included report the presence of aphasia. As expected, in almost all cases, aphasia was due to lesions in the left hemisphere. Wepfer, however, does not seem to have noted this asymmetry. In the second part of this article, the extraordinary study of Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1825) will be reported: Bouillaud outlined the basic principles of anatomo-functional correlations in neuropsychology and applied these principles in order to confirm empirically the role of the frontal lobes in language and speech production.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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