Gustave Dax and the early history of cerebral dominance
S. Finger and D. Roe
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St Louis, Mo., USA.
In 1863, 2 years before Paul Broca published his heralded paper on the
special role of the left hemisphere in speech, Gustave Dax sent a paper to
the Academie de Medecine in Paris, France. His lengthy submission included
an insightful memoir presumably written by his father Marc in 1836 and
supportive material that he had collected himself. The present article
examines the events leading to Gustave's 1863 submission to the Academie.
It also presents an English translation of the negative response that this
paper received and a translation of the short article that Gustave
published in 1865. These materials help to show how cerebral dominance was
first discovered, how it was made public, and how the first advocates of
the concept were judged by their contemporaries.
