Babington's aphasia-overcoming left hemisphere trauma.

He was felled by the shell burst and briefly unconscious, and had sustained a left parietal penetrating injury which made him mute and hemiplegic. He was evacuated by stretcher, ambulance and plane. ‘During the flight I felt something stiff and cold on the right side of my chest. I puzzled about it for a while before it dawned on me that it was my right arm, heavy, insensate and quite paralysed . . . At one point I thought the end had come . . .’2. On the evening of the same day he reached the Military Hospital for Head Injuries at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. X-rays showed ‘a large MFB [metal foreign body] deep in the left parietal lobe just above the ventricular roof but may impinge on it.’ On 3 November Major C A Calvert4 operated on a semiconscious, globally aphasic man who had a right hemiplegia, hemianaesthesia, and hemianopia (Figure 1):