Brain Advance Access published online on April 3, 2008
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awn058
The merest Logomachy: The 1868 Norwich discussion of aphasia by Hughlings Jackson and Broca
Birkbeck College, University of London, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX, UK
Correspondence to:
Dr Marjorie Perlman Lorch, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, UK E-mail: m.lorch{at}bbk.ac.uk
No subject of late years has so occupied the attention of physiologists in all parts of the world, as the attempt to localise the grand attribute of humanity, the faculty of speech.(Bateman, 1870, p. 178)
This article reconsiders the events that took place at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) in Norwich. Paul Broca and John Hughlings Jackson were invited to speak on the new and controversial subject of aphasia. Over the ensuing decades, there have been repeated references made to a debate between Broca and Jackson. This meeting has been identified as a turning point in favour of Broca's position on the cerebral localization of language. A return to original sources from key witnesses reveals that the opinion of the British practitioners was generally against Broca's views. Close examination of contemporaneous materials suggests that no public debate between Jackson and Broca occurred. However, the public discussion after Broca's presentation records notable concerns over both theoretical issues of localization of function and the status of exceptional clinical cases. A significant stage in the development of current views on the organization of language in the brain is revealed in the accounts of the BA meeting in August 1868 and successive responses to these events in the British press over a period of years.
Received October 24, 2007. Revised February 25, 2008. Accepted February 27, 2008.