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Brain 2008 131(1):3-5; doi:10.1093/brain/awm309
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Aphasia and artistic realization (being the Harveian lecture of the Harveian Society, delivered March 17th 1948) by Th. Alajouanine. Brain 1948: 71; 229–241.

Alastair Compston

Cambridge

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Paraphrasing the context from Sir William Gowers, Dr Alajouanine (Fig. 1) declares his subject as lying within the ‘borderlands of aphasia’—specifically the effects of aphasia on three individuals, known to him professionally, each having considerable pre-morbid artistic ability in writing, music or painting, respectively. He considers whether comparisons of their work before and after the onset of illness might illuminate the psychology of language, the mental state associations of aphasia, or (what we would now call) the ‘neuroscience’ of artistry.


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  		Fig. 1 Professeur Théophile Alajouanine (1890–1980: kindly provided by UPMC/SCDM, Bibliothèque Charcot, La Salpêtrière).

 
The successful writer makes his conversational language prosy and tunes his prose to reflect everyday language. He writes as he speaks and vice versa, mimicking Moliere's ‘Would-be gentleman’, M. Jourdain, who was amazed and delighted ‘that his language was prose and that he was thus using prose without being aware of it’. For Charles Baudelaire, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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