ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the diversity of approaches to the treatment of aphasia through the centuries, from remote antiquity down to 1947, the year of publication of Luria's Traumatic Aphasia. It includes general medical and surgical treatments, on the one hand, and specific re-educational measures on the other. The methods used depend ultimately on a conception of the nature of the impairment in aphasia and of the character of the therapeutic process. Armand Trousseau counted himself among the localisationists, but his interest in human lives was even deeper than his interest in dead brains, as his detailed and vivid case histories testify. Trousseau was one of the earliest systematic investigators of aphasia, which he held to be a disorder of memory for words. Aphasia in these cases was usually secondary to some other disease: syphilis, heart conditions, gout, Bright's disease, and "intemperate habits"; in some cases there was a history of milder cerebral attacks preceding a major one.
