Anatomy of the Human Brain and the Problem of Mental Retardation.. This item is unavailable.Anatomy of the Human Brain and the Problem of Mental Retardation.

Mental Retardation. - Proc. 1st. Int. Conf. Ment. Retardation. P.W. Bowman and H.V. Mautner, Eds. - Grune & Stratton, Inc., 1959, 8°, 43 pp., 18 Figs., orig. wrappers. Offprint! From the Department of Neurolgy and Warren Anatomical Museum, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass. Read in abstract before the First International Medical Conference on Mental Retardation, July 27, 1959, Portland, Maine. "THE ORIENTATION of one's thoughts and ideas depends to a large extent on empirical facts and generalizations derived from personal experience; mine have been derived from experience with mentally retarded individuals, many of whom I have examined also at autopsy, with particular attention to the brain. The problem of correlation of the organization of behavior with the anatomic structure and morphologic organization of the brain in the normal and in the mentally retarded individual was a natural challenge. In the attempt to meet the challenge I have had to define and set the problem of correlation in a frame of reference appropriate to a relevant answer. My candid inclination has been to define the problem empirically and to fit the facts and data into an empirical frame of reference. For only thus, I believe, could one derive from facts and data the answers which are empirically relevant. This is particularly true with regard to a subject such as that of mental retardation. Indeed, in studying the behavior of individuals whom we consider as mentally retarded, it is our own behavior which we take as the norm. The answers must be somehow relevant to that empirical norm."Yakovlev Paul Ivan Yakovlev (1894-1983) was a Russian-American neuroanatomist who worked at Harvard Medical School. He is the namesake of the Yakovlevian torque, an asymmetry of human brains. He made contributions in the "origins of the frontopontine tract in humans, neurocutaneous syndromes and epilepsy, neuronal substrates and epilepsy, schizencephaly, arhinencephalia, mental retardation, decussation of the bulbar pyramidal tract, frontal lobotomies, the limbic cortex, the time of myelination and the anatomy of the limbic cortex, corpus callosum, and thalamus, and two classic anatomical atlases.".…