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Show OUR WONDERFUL BRAIN. In an article on "Brain and Body," in the July Everybody"u;Dr. William Hanna Thomson writes: "The disccWry of a special speech region in the - -hraia- ftif V. a- 'fi-y"--for t'hiwfr-yHH. j.-liwnlvT .. after M.f this mysterious physical organ of j the rh. JgvJcn as regards the faculty of speech itself, wvftasi soon revealed that it had three separate sep-arate anatomical seats in the brain: One for hearing hear-ing words. Another for seeing, and a third for speaking thpm. "How st -arate and distinct from this uttering center the Wrflin place for reading is, was illustrated illustrat-ed by a lad- patient of mine who was astonished one morning at finding that she could not read a word in anything, whether newspaper or book. She thought something must be wrong with her. eyes-but eyes-but she saw everything about the room as well as ever and could sew and knit. I tested her speech carefully and" found that she could hear every word addressed to her and could talk remarkably well. Her reading brain center, however, had been destroyed de-stroyed in the night without her waking, by a plug in the. little artery which supplies that place, and she forthwith became as illiterate as a Papuan savage, nor did she learn to read again, succumbing succumb-ing to apoplexy two years afterward. "Generally more than one speech center is injured in-jured by an apoplectic hemorrhage in the brain, as was the case with a patient of mine, a gentleman who one morning lost not only all power of utterance, utter-ance, but also all ability to read. He could, however, how-ever, hear words perfectly and, strange to tell, he proved that the place for arithmetical figures is in a different brain locality from that for words, because be-cause he could read and write figures and calculate calcu-late every kind of sum in large business transactions, transac-tions, which he successfully conducted for seven years afterward, without once being able to speak a word or even to read his own signature." |
