The Galileo of Neurology
The Galileo of Neurology
This chapter focuses on Arthur Ladbroke Wigan, a British family doctor who died in 1847. Wigan proposed the idea that the left and right cerebral hemispheres are not two parts of one organ but two separate brains, each with its own feelings, thoughts, and impulses. Each brain selects, interprets, and registers at its own discretion, and each forgets according to its own laws. Problems arise only if one brain is damaged in some way or if both brains become sick. Then the sick brain may start to rebel and the healthy brain has to relinquish leadership, with disastrous consequences for both performance and experience. With his two brains, Wigan was trying to bring order to pathological phenomena that two generations later would be divided along a different axis: that which separates consciousness and the unconscious.
Keywords: Arthur Ladbroke Wigan, left brain, right brain, left hemisphere, right hemisphere, human memory, consciousness, unconscious
Yale Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
