On Aphasia

OUR present knowledge of aphasic disorders is the product of an evolution which spans millennia. Delineation of these conditions, their differentiation from other types of disorder of speech and language, and ideas about their causation and basic nature developed very gradually. The earliest medical writings (including the Hippocratic Corpus) made reference only to a general 'speech-lessness' or 'loss of voice' which seemingly covered all types of impairment of speech and language, including not only those which today would be called aphasic but also those due to frank paralysis and to disturbed states of conscious-ness, as well as those of psychogenic origin. The beginnings differentiation due tongue the most writers late classical period. a case of traumatic alexia A.D. Galen's assertion that 'word memory' could be lost as a of head injury, further that distinctions between various types of speech and language were this the role of abnormalities of the brain or its ventricles in causing some types of speech disorder was clearly