Cerebral localisationism

Today, even the less informed high school students know that different brain functions are located in its particular structures and not in others, as can be observed, for example, in the case of speech and its disorders: the aphasias.

This doctrine, named cerebral localisationism, appears in an era in which sophisticated computer equipment is capable of showing, with a dot to dot precision, where a particular cerebral function is carried out; but it wasn’t always like this. At the end of the XVIII century, one of the most powerful methods for inferring the brain functions was the observation of people with neurological damage produced by brain injuries, such as tumors, cerebrovascular accidents, traumatisms, etc. The main sources for knowledge on the brain were the dissections performed on animal and people corpses. The localization of cerebral functions, could only be approximated by the fact that there are many structures with a different aspect in the brain, and maybe could be responsible for different capacities of the mind. It was in this complex scenario that Dr. Franz Joseph Gall, born in Baden, Germany in 1758, leaded the idea that different mental functions are really located in different parts of the brain.

Collaborated in this article: Lic. Esteban Cynowiec

Ambroise Paré (XVI century) was the first person to perform the ligature of arteries.