ABSTRACT
Throughout the ages, medical men and philosophers have tried to localise the physical and mental convolutions of the human brain and body. Perhaps the most significant and persistent early attempt at localisation involving the brain, was the work of the phrenologists, Franz Gall and Johann Spurzheim and the crazy popularising of their work by Fowler in the late 19th century. In his autobiographical study written in 1925, Sigmund Freud was able to pronounce proudly that his skill at localising the site of brain damage was so widely acclaimed that after his diagnosis the pathologists had nothing to add at post-mortem. The mapping of the sensory and motor surfaces of the body in the cortex, and the discoveries of Broca and Wernicke, made a strong case for the general principle of localisation. Freud noticed that Broca’s and Wernicke’s separate localisations revealed speech problems with very different symptoms though both coming under the heading of aphasias.
