Lip chorea and paresis of the external pterygoid muscles : commonly called 'stammering' / by Edward Blake.

  • Blake, Edward T. (Edward Thomas), 1842-1905.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lip chorea and paresis of the external pterygoid muscles : commonly called 'stammering' / by Edward Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    because their religion strictly forbade all needless touching of a dead body. Embalming, whilst common in Egypt, was not practised by the Jews ; hence the study of anatomy, which originated probably in this custom, had no opportunity of development in Palestine. Yet to a Jewish poet of gentle birth, writing, circ. 700 b.c.. in a series of denunciatory utterances, remarkable for their fire and vigour, yet full of a strange beauty and pathos, we are indebted for the information, of profound interest to us busy mortals of a later age, that stammering was well known to the Jews at that early date. On first reading Isaiah xxviii, 11, we might even credit the author with a wonderfully accurate acquaintance with the physiology of speech when we encounter the following words, “ for with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people.” But on more careful scrutiny we find that the Hebrew word “lah-gelig” does not happen to mean stammering at all but “mocking”—see same word Psalm xxxv, 16. It is found twenty-seven times in the Old Testament, and is usually rendered either as “mock” or “laugh to scorn.” The analo- gous word “ gil-lehg,” in Isaiah xxxii, 4, seems to really indicate “stammering,” and it is the more in- teresting as being the solitary and unique reference to this form of speechimpediment in the older Jewish writings. Later we shall see a curious reason why stammering was probably uncommon amongst the