Part 10 (2/2)

Goldstein's fascinating case-histories, scattered through many books and journals, await collection.

A. R. Luria The greatest neurological treasure of our time, for both thought and case description, is the works of A. R. Luria. Most of Luria's books have been translated into English. The most accessible are: The Man with a Shattered World. New York: 1972. The Mind of a Mnemonist. New York: 1968.

Speech amp; the Development of Mental Processes in the Child. London: 1959. A study of mental defect, speech, play, and twins.

Human Brain and Psychological Process. New York: 1966. Case histories of patients with frontal lobe syndromes.

The Neuropsychology of Memory. New York: 1976.

Higher Cortical Functions in Man. 2nd ed. New York: 1980. Luria's magnum opus-the greatest synthesis of neurological work and thought in our century.

The Working Brain. Harmondsworth: 1973. A condensed and highly readable version of the above. The best available introduction to neuropsychology.

CHAPTER REFERENCES.

1. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Macrae, D. and Trolle, E. ”The defect of function in visual agnosia.” Brain (1956) 77: 94-110.

Kertesz, A. ”Visual agnosia: the dual deficit of perception and recognition.” Cortex (1979) J 5: 403-19.

Marr, D. See below under Chapter 15.

Damasio, A. R. ”Disorders in Visual Processing,” in M. M. Mesulam (1985), pp. 259-88. (See below under Chapter 8.) 2. The Lost Mariner Korsakov's original (1887) contribution and his later works have not been translated. A full bibliography, with translated excerpts and discussion, is given in A. R. Luria's Neuropsychology of Memory (op. cit.), which itself provides many striking examples of amnesia akin to that of ”The Lost Mariner.” Both here, and in the preceding case history, I refer to Anton, Potzl, and Freud. Of these only Freud's monograph-a work of great importance-has been translated into English.

Anton, G. ”Uber die Selbstwarnehmung der Herderkrankungen des Gehirns durch den Kranken.” Arch. Psychiat. (1899) 32.

Freud, S. Zur Auffa.s.sung der Aphasia. Leipzig: 1891. Authorized English tr., by E. Stengel, as On Aphasia: A Critical Study. New York: 1953.

Potzl, O. Die Aphasielehre vom Standpunkt der klinischen Psychiatrie: Die Optische-agnostischen Storungen. Leipzig: 1928. The syndrome Potzl describes is not merely visual, but may extend to a complete unawareness of parts, or one half, of the body. As such it is also relevant to the themes of Chapters 3, 4, and 8. It is also referred to in my book A Leg to Stand On (1984).

3. The Disembodied Lady Sherrington, C. S. The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. Cambridge: 1906. Esp. pp. 335-43.

----. Man on His Nature. Cambridge: 1940. Ch. 11, esp. pp.

328-9, has the most direct relevance to this patient's condition.

Purdon Martin, J. The Basal Ganglia and Posture. London: 1967. This important book is more extensively referred to in Chapter 7.

Weir Mitch.e.l.l, S. See below under Chapter 6.

Sterman, A. B. et al. ”The acute sensory neuronopathy syndrome.” Annals of Neurology (1979) 7: 354-8.

4. The Man Who Fell out of Bed Potzl, O. Op. cit.

5. Hands Leont'ev, A. N. and Zaporozhets, A. V. Rehabilitation of Hand Function. Eng. tr. Oxford: 1960.

6. Phantoms Sterman, A. B. et al. Op. cit.

Weir Mitch.e.l.l, S. Injuries of Nerves. 1872; Dover repr. 1965. This great book contains Weir Mitch.e.l.l's cla.s.sic accounts of phantom limbs, reflex paralysis, etc. from the American Civil War. It is wonderfully vivid and easy to read, for Weir Mitch.e.l.l was a novelist no less than a neurologist. Indeed, some of his most imaginative neurological writings (such as ”The Case of George Dedlow”) were published not in scientific journals but in the Atlantic Monthly in the 1860s and 1870s, and are therefore not very accessible now, though they enjoyed an immense readers.h.i.+p at the time.

7. On the Level Purdon Martin, J. Op. cit. Esp. ch. 3, pp. 36-51.

8. Eyes Right!

Battersby, W. S. et al. ”Unilateral 'spatial agnosia' (inattention) in patients with cerebral lesions.” Brain (1956) 79: 68-93.

Mesulam, M. M. Principles of Behavioral Neurology (Philadelphia: 1985), pp. 259-88.

9. The President's Speech The best discussion of Frege on ”tone” is to be found in Dummett, M., Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: 1973), esp. pp. 83-89.

Head's discussion of speech and language, in particular its ”feeling-tone,” is best read in his treatise on aphasia (op. cit.). Hughlings Jackson's work on speech was widely scattered, but much was brought together posthumously in ”Hughlings Jackson on aphasia and kindred affections of speech, together with a complete bibliography of his publications of speech and a reprint of some of the more important papers,” Brain (1915) 38: 1-190.

On the complex and confused subject of the auditory agnosias, see Hecaen, H. and Albert, M. L., Human Neuropsychology (New York: 1978), pp. 265-76.

10. Witty Ticcy Ray In 1885 Gilles de la Tourette published a two-part paper in which he described with extreme vividness (he was a playwright as well as a neurologist) the syndrome that now bears his name: ”Etude sur an affection nerveuse caracterisee par l'incoordination motrice accompagnee d'echo-lalie et de coprolalie,” Arch. Neurol. 9: 19-42, 158-200. The first English translation of these papers, with interesting editorial comments, is provided by: Goetz, C. G. and Klawans, H. L., Gilles de la Tourette on Tourette Syndrome (New York: 1982).

In Meige and Feidel's great Les Tics et leur traitement (1902), brilliantly translated by Kinnier Wilson in 1907, there is a wonderful opening personal memoir by a patient, ”Les confidences d'un ticqueur,” which is unique of its kind.

11. Cupid's Disease As with Tourette's syndrome, we must go back to the older literature to find full clinical descriptions. Kraepelin, Freud's contemporary, provides many striking vignettes of neurosyphilis. The interested reader might consult: Kraepelin, E., Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry (Eng. tr. London: 1904), in particular chs. 10 and 12 on megalomania and delirium in general paralysis.

12. A Matter of Ident.i.ty See Luria (1976).

13. Yes, Father-Sister See Luria (1966).

14. The Possessed See above under Chapter 10.

15. Reminiscence Alajouanine, T. ”Dostoievski's epilepsy.” Brain (1963) 86: 209-21.

Critchley, M. and Henson, R. A., eds. Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music. London: 1977. Esp. chs. 19 and 20.

Penfield, W. and Perot, P. ”The brain's record of visual and auditory experience: a final summary and discussion.” Brain (1963) 86: 595-696. I regard this magnificent 100-page paper, the culmination of nearly thirty years' profound observation, experiment, and thought, as one of the most original and important in all neurology. It stunned me when it came out in 1963 and was constantly in my mind when I wrote Migraine in 1967. It is the essential reference and inspiration to the whole of this section. More readable than many novels, it has a wealth and strangeness of material which any novelist would envy.

Salaman, E. A Collection of Moments. London: 1970.

Williams, D. ”The structure of emotions reflected in epileptic experiences.” Brain (1956) 79: 29-67.

Hughlings Jackson was the first to address himself to ”psychical seizures,” to describe their almost novelistic phenomenology and to identify their anatomical loci in the brain. He wrote several papers on the subject. Most pertinent are those published in Volume 1 of his Selected Writings (1931), pp. 251ff. and 274ff., and the following (not included in that volume): Jackson, J. H. ”On right- or left-sided spasm at the onset of epileptic paroxysms, and on crude sensation warnings, and elaborate mental states.” Brain (1880) 3: 192-206.

----. ”On a particular variety of epilepsy ('Intellectual Aura').”

Brain (1888) I J: 179-207.

Purdon Martin has provided an intriguing suggestion that Henry James met Hughlings Jackson, discussed such seizures with him, and employed this knowledge in his depiction of the uncanny apparitions in The Turn of the Screw. ”Neurology in fiction: The Turn of the Screw,” British Medical]. (1973)4:717-21.

Marr, D. Vision: A Computational Investigation of Visual Representation in Man. San Francisco: 1982. This is a work of extreme originality and importance, published posthumously (Marr contracted leukemia while still a young man). Penfield shows us the forms of the brain's final representations-voices, faces, tunes, scenes-the ”iconic”: Marr shows us what is not intuitively obvious, or ever normally experienced-the form of the brain's initial representations. Perhaps I should have given this reference in Chapter 1-it is certain that Dr. P. had some ”Marr-like” deficits, difficulties in forming what Marr calls a ”primal sketch” in addition to, or underlying, his physiognomonic difficulties. Probably no neurological study of imagery, or memory, can dispense with the considerations raised by Marr.

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