ABSTRACT
In the classical period that ended approximately with World War I, the approach to the aphasias and other disturbances of the so-called higher functions of the nervous system relied heavily on anatomical knowledge. Broca’s (1861) paper, which revealed for the first time that localized lesions of the nervous system could lead to disorders of language, stimulated an 108enormous interest in the founders of the infant specialty of clinical neurology. Wernicke’s (1874) paper published thirteen years later opened the period of the great investigations that continued for another half-century. Stimulated by Meynert’s sketch of the major outlines of the cortical connections, he attempted to account for the syndromes of aphasia. A major portion of the advances in the field were made by either his assistants or students in Breslau, or by others following his theoretical approaches (Geschwind, 1966, 1967b). This approach was the only one extensively capable of generating predictions. The other two approaches'—i.e., the holistic approach and the mosaicist approach-—each had protagonists who made important contributions but neither of these approaches ever matched the successful predictive capacity of the connectionist approach of Wernicke. Although it is commonly believed that the teachings of Wernicke’s school were seriously challenged, particularly by the holists, none of the opponents could advance major evidence which threatened the general outlines of aphasia as developed by the Breslau school. Thus Kurt Goldstein (1917) pointed out that his disagreements with the classical localizationist teachings extended only to finer aspects of localization too subtle to be dealt with by current anatomical techniques. As has been pointed out elsewhere (Geschwind, 1964), Goldstein not only accepted the major tenets of Wernicke but made major contributions in the same theoretical tradition. Head (1926) totally rejected this approach, but in his own work ended up with a series of localizations that agreed with those of his classical predecessors.
