ISOLATION OF THE SPEECH AREA

PREFACE The credit for discovering this remarkable patient and for studying her so carefully over many years goes to Dr. Fred Quadfasel, who also demon­ strated her remarkable capacity for verbal learning. Without these astute clinical and experimental observations the subsequent post-mortem findings would have been of little use. Combining the two, however, made it possible to draw far-reaching theoretical conclusions from this experi­ ment of nature. Perhaps the most important conclusion is that compre­ hension of language is not unitary. Thus this patient could complete common phrases, and could perform other discriminatory activities, while she failed at others. This conclusion is reinforced by other findings, e.g., some patients with severe comprehension deficits for questions and com­ mands for the individual limbs may yet respond very well to commands carried out with the axial musculature, e.g., 'sit down', 'stand up' 'walk', etc. Although repetition disorder of the type presented by this patient had been described before, I believe that the remarkable preservation of verbal learning in the presence of a severe acquired comprehension deficit had not previously been described. The explanation of this phenomenon as given in the paper fits in well with many of the same anatomical findings which account for the preservation of repetition.