ON LOOKING INTO APHASIA

During my musings on aphasia, I came across a treatment for communication disorders. Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is a therapeutic process used by music therapists and speech-language pathologists to help patients with communication disorders caused by damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. This method uses a style of singing that is supposed to stimulate the intact right hemisphere to facilitate speech and language recovery in the damaged portion of the left hemisphere. However, according to recent research, it may not be singing that is the crucial element in MIT, but rhythmic pacing and the intensive use of conversational speech formulas.

As I surfed along, my eye then fell on a little bit of British history:

Two hundred and fifty six years ago, today, on the 15 January 1759, the British Museum opened its doors to the public for the first time. On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his formal assent to the Act of Parliament, The British Museum Act 1753, which established the British Museum. The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. With the acquisition of Montagu House the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759.

Lord Elgin

What is remarkable is its vast collection of stuff, largely the result of its catholic methods of acquisition. The Elgin Marbles are an instance in point.

Lord Byron did not care for the sculptures, calling them "misshapen monuments". He strongly objected to their removal from Greece, denouncing Elgin as a vandal.

John Newport

Sir John Newport said:

"The Honourable Lord has taken advantage of the most unjustifiable means and has committed the most flagrant pillages. It was, it seems, fatal that a representative of our country loot those objects that the Turks and other barbarians had considered sacred."

Since then, other voices, in the House of Lords, have raised more acute concerns about the fate of the Elgin Marbles if they were to be returned to Greece. In an exchange on 19 May 1997, Lord Woodrow Wyatt, asked:

Woodrow Wyatt

“My Lords, is the Minister aware that it would be dangerous to return the marbles to Athens because they were under attack by Turkish and Greek fire in the Parthenon when they were rescued and the volatile Greeks might easily start hurling bombs around again?”

Woodrow Wyatt was a great friend of the Queen Mother, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch and was Chairman of the Tote.

In a review by Craig Brown of The Journals Of Woodrow Wyatt : Volume Two published in the Daily Mail on 28th May 2008, Brown wrote:

“In 1989, Mrs Thatcher asks Woodrow Wyatt how she can tune into the new channel, Sky. He doesn't know. That night at the launch party, he personally asks Andrew Neil, at that time the Chairman of Sky, but he has no idea. He then asks Rupert Murdoch, who owns it, but he doesn't know either. Somehow, this is the perfect parable for the hollow populism of the Thatcher years.”

The things you find when looking into aphasia.