Volume 32, Number 18 · November 21, 1985
A Hero of the Brain
By Israel Rosenfield
Selected Papers on Language and the Brain
by Norman Geschwind
D. Reidel, 549 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Cerebral Dominance: The Biological Foundations
edited by Norman Geschwind, edited by Albert M. Galaburda
Harvard University Press, 232 pp., $27.50
Dyslexia: Current Status and Future Directions
edited by Frank Hopkins Duffy, edited by Norman Geschwind
Little, Brown, 223 pp., $32.50
Nineteenth-century neurology was dominated by two opposing schools of thought. Early in the century the Austrian neuroanatomist Franz Gall and his disciples claimed that, to those practiced in the art, an examination of bumps on a person's head revealed talents and psychological characteristics; traits of character, he held, were controlled by specific regions of the brain. Gall had a fashionable success in France, but was ridiculed by the leading neurologist of the day, M.J.P. Flourens, who had performed experiments on birds' brains. At the height of his fame in the 1840s, when he defeated Victor Hugo for membership in the French Academy, Flourens believed that he had conclusively demonstrated that activities such as walking and flying were not dependent on any particular region of the brain. The brain functions as a whole, he argued, and it was impossible to predict the specific effects of any form of damage.
Review, 5309 words
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