THE FACULTY OF ARTICULATE LANGUAGE. 351 



treatise to this volume, Hammond on the " Diseases of the 

 Nervous System," the chapter on aphasia not only contains 

 a full historical account of the disease, but is enriched by 

 numerous original observations of the most striking char- 

 acter. The profound acquirements of Dr. Hammond as a 

 physiologist, and his skill as an original investigator in this 

 department, lend additional weight to his deductions. In 

 our references to the bibliography of the subject, we shall 

 make use of the labors of Dr. Hammond, by whom the lit- 

 erature has been exhaustively studied. 1 



Dr. Hammond states that " by aphasia is understood a 

 condition produced by an affection of the brain by which the 

 idea of language, or of its expression, is impaired." Certain 

 cases of this disease present loss of speech because the sub- 

 ject is incapable of coordinating the muscles used in articu- 

 lation. The patient has a clear idea of language and of the 

 meaning of words, and is able to write perfectly well. In 

 other cases, the patient can neither speak nor express ideas 

 in writing. In these, the idea of language is lost. In both 

 of these varieties of the disease, the difficulty is either in the 

 organ presiding over the faculty of speech or in the connec- 

 tions of this organ with the muscles concerned in articula- 

 tion. Thus regarded, aphasia does not include aphonia from 

 laryngeal disease, or loss of speech such as is observed fre- 

 quently in hysteria, in the insane, who sometimes refuse to 

 speak from pure obstinacy, or in cases of paralysis of the 

 parts immediately concerned in articulation. The whole 

 history of the disease points to a particular part of the brain 

 which presides over the faculty of speech. 



While we do not propose to treat of the history of apha- 

 sia, we cannot refrain from quoting a case, detailed in 1T66, 

 by Pourfour du Petit, which possesses great historical inter- 

 est, as one of the first, if not the very first, in which the 

 symptoms now recognized as aphasic were connected with 

 disease of the left anterior cerebral lobe. "We quote this 



1 HAMMOND, Diseases of the Nervous System, Xew York, 1871, p. 166, et *eq. 

 123 



