Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain, 1825-1926 (review)

L. S. Jacyna. Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain, 1825-1926. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ix + 241 pp. Ill. $45.00; £28.50 (0-691-00413-7).

The history of aphasiology has been sketched frequently, but only in snippets and chapters. Its very complexity should beckon historians of science and culture to explore it in greater depth, because language is so culturally determined, while the sciences of the brain are supposed to be objective and "hard." Stephen Jacyna's previous contributions to neurohistory have been well received, so it is disappointing to find this book by a good scholar to be so badly flawed. In the end, Lost Words founders on the rocky shoals of the old internalist/externalist divide, because it is impossible to write the history of language and its disorders from either perspective alone.

At the outset, it is only fair to point out that the author did not intend to write a definitive history of aphasiology. Rather, he is interested in applying contemporary methods of textual analysis to selected writings in that history. His "interpretive resources" include Nietzsche, Foucault, and Shapin and Schaffer (pp. 19-20). Unfortunately but predictably, the assumption of the primacy of text over content leads to biased inadequacy. This problem arises immediately in the first chapter, in which Jacyna analyzes the rich narrative description of Dr. Jacques Lordat's report of his own episode of aphasia in 1825. Jacyna makes it abundantly clear that he prefers this kind of individualized case report, in contrast to the drier and more distanced texts of later synthetic approaches. This makes some sense if one is interested in textual analysis, but it distorts or ignores the historical significance of the texts that he dislikes, and it removes them from the historical context of the narratives that he favors.

Chapter 2 deals with Broca and the famous debates about language localization at the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1861. Jacyna is correct, of course, that the slippery slope to localizationism and connectionism began then and there. His most egregious missteps occur in chapter 3, where he tries to apply textual analysis to the work of Wernicke, Lichtheim, and other early connectionists, albeit superficially. On p. 110, Jacyna accuses the early connectionists of "implicit scientism," because they tried to reduce the clinical phenomena of aphasia to lawful generalities. He summarily dismisses their diagrams as mere "stylistic devices," apparently intended to delude the reader into thinking that this was genuine, "exact" science; there is no attempt at an explanation of the diagrams' contents, and certainly no indication that they did have some predictive value. But how else does science proceed except by reducing individual events to generalities? Imagine the reaction if a historian of physics simply dismissed some old physicist's equation as a "stylistic device," because it was not a perfect representation of all individual cases.

In truth, textual analysis might have something interesting to say about the rhetorical devices of the connectionists' texts, if it were used appropriately. The Achilles' heel of the older (and the newer) connectionistic schemes is the problem of language "comprehension," which was the essence of Wernicke's contribution--it was critical but simultaneously difficult to define in our usual sensory-motor, associationistic terms. If Wernicke's texts were scrutinized with sufficient grasp of their technical content, it might be very interesting to see how he and his successors handled this difficulty.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the two icons of British aphasiology, Hughlings Jackson and Henry Head, whose supposedly holistic positions are Jacyna's guideposts. The standard historical line is that Head resurrected Jackson's aphasiological writings from their undeserved oblivion, and Jacyna does not dispute or embellish that story. Jackson's writings are generally difficult to analyze, especially in the area of aphasia; Jacyna dances around them neither more nor less than most...