Disorders of Language. Ciba Foundation Symposium

sents a review, as is true for the other sections, it is well presented. The authors of the eight papers on this topic are among the leaders in the field, and the studies complement one another nicely. The general quality of all the papers is high, and they are well written. Throughout the book, the discussions at the end of the papers are extremely good. They are spirited and point out areas of disagreement to the less sophisticated reader. One of the deficiencies of the book is the wide range of topics covered. Although both the renal physiologist and the clinician would find things of interest, neither would be completely satisfied. It was annoying in view of the high cost of the book ($11.00) to find the last two papers so confused through a printing error that they were unreadable. The book is interesting and worth reading but would appeal primarily to someone with a research interest in renal disease. This volume is the product of a three-day symposium on aphasia held in May, 1963 by 22 contributors representing the fields of neurology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and phonetics. The basic problems toward which this symposium was oriented, as stated by Lord Brain, were: can language disorders be satisfactorily classified in linguistic terms; if so, what relationship would such a classification have to the clinical varieties of aphasia and the anatomical localization of language functions in the brain. This attempt to sort out the confusion of psychological, anatomical and physiological thinking which permeates the literature on aphasia was, of course, unsuccessful. Yet, the book offers the reader a stimulating opportunity to view the problems aphasia presents through the eyes of experts in a variety of medical and nonmedical fields. The book consists of a series of presentations followed by open discus. sion. All papers and discussions are annotated. Some papers take a general approach to the subject whereas others deal with specific research efforts. Some of the advantages and limitations of the linguistic approach are represented in the first paper by Jakobson. The application of this method of language analysis to aphasia is fairly recent and may prove to be of considerable value in defining the speech defects which occur in this condition. However, in this linguistic classification of aphasia the distinctions drawn are not always obvious and the chapter is difficult and somewhat obscured by an unfamiliar terminology. Alajouanine presents …