[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR:] SIn,—True to your principle,
"Humani nihil a me alienum puto," you have lately given your readers a thoughtful and thought-pro- voking paper on Lord Denman's aphasia. In the course of it you
remark, "Is it not reasonable to conjecture that even in cases where no trace of the power of either apprehending or communi-
cating remains, there may still be—as in the instance of the patient who recently recorded his own impressions of etherisation in these columns—a keen intellectual life behind the wreck of the nervous
system? "
If I remember rightly, the eminent French physician, Trousseau, in his remark on this disorder, mentions two cases—one of them that of Professor Lordat, of Montpellier—in which the patients recovered from the attack, and recorded their, for the time, unutterable impressions. Assuming that there are probably some persons in England also
who have passed through and out of the temporary form of aphasia, I would solicit from them, in the name of our common humanity and of science, a similar record of experience ; and from you, the medium of at least one such communication.
s I think, articulate. I laugh, and weep, And exercise all functions of a man ; How, then, should I and any man that lives Be strangers to each other ?"
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