The third man: Robert Dunn’s (1799-1877) contribution to aphasia research in mid 19th century England

Throughout his medical career, Robert Dunn (1799-1877) published a number of clinical cases with post-mortem reports involving acquired language disorders, the first noted in 1842. He developed a physiologically informed approach to psychological function during the 1850s along with a group of notable colleagues Benjamin Collins Brodie, Henry Holland, Thomas Laycock, John Daniel Morell, and Daniel Noble. He was also active in ethnographic research on human origins and racial diversity. As such, Dunn represents an interesting player in the developing fields of neurology, psychology, and anthropology in England in the latter part of the 19th century. These various strands converged at the meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in 1868, where Dunn shared the program of lectures on the cutting edge topic of aphasia with Paul Broca (1824-1880) and John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911). Dunn’s ideas developed over a longer time-frame than his younger colleagues and as such represent a unique blending of concepts from the earlier work of Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828) and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1798-1881) to the perspectives on language organization in the brain developed after 1861