Sam&Sam’s contribution to NAAM. Click on the image to order from Amazon.
This is National Aphasia Awareness Month (NAAM), but the campaign is global. Aphasia is a disorder that impairs the expression and understanding of language, as well as reading and writing. It may be caused by head injury, a brain tumor, infection, or dementia, but the most common cause is a stroke, usually on the left side of the brain. The Aphasia part of the Stroke Association’s website is: www.stroke.org.uk/what-is-aphasia and we have been advised to include the following hashtags in this blog: #Aphasia #AphasiaAwareness #CommunicationAccess.
The thrust of this campaign is both to bring home to us all how common aphasia is and to educate us in how best to interact with people who are affected by it. About 350,000 people currently have aphasia in Britain. Approximately 100,000 people suffer strokes in the UK each year, and almost half of them need speech and language therapy. Stroke Association UK addresses what aphasics need from us here.
But the background to the campaign is incredibly encouraging. The number of deaths from stroke in the U.K. has fallen by 49% in the last fifteen years, thanks to better prevention and great advances in treatment. Above all, attitudes to stroke recovery have changed. Fifty years ago, stroke was seen as an effect of ageing that led inevitably to disability or death; it was treated fatalistically. I witnessed that myself when my grandmother had a bad stroke in 1970. The stroke unit for the elderly was in a workhouse infirmary built in the 1850s. The nurses were caring, but my grandmother had hardly any physiotherapy, no speech and language therapy, and minimal stimulation. Essentially, such stroke survivors languished; it was not thought possible to improve their condition. (My mother brought my grandmother home as soon as possible and organised her own care package.) Today, as a campaigns director of the Stroke Association has put it, ‘The issue is improving rehabilitation: how do we make sure that a good life after stroke is possible?’
Where overcoming aphasia is concerned, the greatest source of hope in my opinion is the miraculous and mysterious life of the human brain. When my mother called me in to her early one morning and I realised she had had a stroke, she spoke to me in long English sentences that made no sense, but she also uttered sentences in what, as the manager of a translation agency, I realised were Dutch and French. I could not believe it, as she certainly ‘knew’ no Dutch and her French was not fluent. Later, however, I learned that this sort of thing is not unusual. (I have been told of a stroke survivor who could not speak Welsh, but had been evacuated to Wales as a child and after his stroke produced Welsh sentences that it was thought he had overheard in the neighbour’s garden seventy years before.) The brain is so receptive, retentive and self-reordering, that — given motivation, intensive speech and language therapy, and the wholehearted involvement of family and friends — we need never despair of improvement in a stroke survivor’s aphasic condition.
My mother was left with only 20% of her language ability after her stroke, but over two years, with the dedication of everyone involved, she recovered a further 69% of it. My grandmother, eleven years after her stroke and at the age of ninety-one, could articulate only basic formulaic statements, but when she was shown her four-month-old great grandson (bawling his head off), she dumbfounded us by smiling and saying distinctly: ‘I think he is very nice.’ Before I spoke to a certain stroke club in 2013, I was advised that the listener in a wheelchair would understand everything I said, desperately want to say something, but suffered from ‘severe aphasia’ that would prevent him. On the day of my talk, however, his carer told me that recently, almost a year after his stroke, there had been a breakthrough. He had been over-confident with his electric wheelchair, had forgotten there were some steep basement stairs behind him in a public place, and reversed onto them, which caused him to shout ‘F—–g a——-s!’ as he thudded down backwards. Not much, you might think, but it suddenly provided light at the end of the tunnel. Since then, he had made slow, but significant progress with his aphasia. He participated in the discussion after my talk with body language and expressive intonations.
The author’s mother, four years after her stroke, laughing at the author’s hat
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George Calderon, 1912
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
National Aphasia Awareness Month: A message of hope
Sam&Sam’s contribution to NAAM. Click on the image to order from Amazon.
This is National Aphasia Awareness Month (NAAM), but the campaign is global. Aphasia is a disorder that impairs the expression and understanding of language, as well as reading and writing. It may be caused by head injury, a brain tumor, infection, or dementia, but the most common cause is a stroke, usually on the left side of the brain. The Aphasia part of the Stroke Association’s website is: www.stroke.org.uk/what-is-aphasia and we have been advised to include the following hashtags in this blog: #Aphasia #AphasiaAwareness #CommunicationAccess.
The thrust of this campaign is both to bring home to us all how common aphasia is and to educate us in how best to interact with people who are affected by it. About 350,000 people currently have aphasia in Britain. Approximately 100,000 people suffer strokes in the UK each year, and almost half of them need speech and language therapy. Stroke Association UK addresses what aphasics need from us here.
But the background to the campaign is incredibly encouraging. The number of deaths from stroke in the U.K. has fallen by 49% in the last fifteen years, thanks to better prevention and great advances in treatment. Above all, attitudes to stroke recovery have changed. Fifty years ago, stroke was seen as an effect of ageing that led inevitably to disability or death; it was treated fatalistically. I witnessed that myself when my grandmother had a bad stroke in 1970. The stroke unit for the elderly was in a workhouse infirmary built in the 1850s. The nurses were caring, but my grandmother had hardly any physiotherapy, no speech and language therapy, and minimal stimulation. Essentially, such stroke survivors languished; it was not thought possible to improve their condition. (My mother brought my grandmother home as soon as possible and organised her own care package.) Today, as a campaigns director of the Stroke Association has put it, ‘The issue is improving rehabilitation: how do we make sure that a good life after stroke is possible?’
Where overcoming aphasia is concerned, the greatest source of hope in my opinion is the miraculous and mysterious life of the human brain. When my mother called me in to her early one morning and I realised she had had a stroke, she spoke to me in long English sentences that made no sense, but she also uttered sentences in what, as the manager of a translation agency, I realised were Dutch and French. I could not believe it, as she certainly ‘knew’ no Dutch and her French was not fluent. Later, however, I learned that this sort of thing is not unusual. (I have been told of a stroke survivor who could not speak Welsh, but had been evacuated to Wales as a child and after his stroke produced Welsh sentences that it was thought he had overheard in the neighbour’s garden seventy years before.) The brain is so receptive, retentive and self-reordering, that — given motivation, intensive speech and language therapy, and the wholehearted involvement of family and friends — we need never despair of improvement in a stroke survivor’s aphasic condition.
My mother was left with only 20% of her language ability after her stroke, but over two years, with the dedication of everyone involved, she recovered a further 69% of it. My grandmother, eleven years after her stroke and at the age of ninety-one, could articulate only basic formulaic statements, but when she was shown her four-month-old great grandson (bawling his head off), she dumbfounded us by smiling and saying distinctly: ‘I think he is very nice.’ Before I spoke to a certain stroke club in 2013, I was advised that the listener in a wheelchair would understand everything I said, desperately want to say something, but suffered from ‘severe aphasia’ that would prevent him. On the day of my talk, however, his carer told me that recently, almost a year after his stroke, there had been a breakthrough. He had been over-confident with his electric wheelchair, had forgotten there were some steep basement stairs behind him in a public place, and reversed onto them, which caused him to shout ‘F—–g a——-s!’ as he thudded down backwards. Not much, you might think, but it suddenly provided light at the end of the tunnel. Since then, he had made slow, but significant progress with his aphasia. He participated in the discussion after my talk with body language and expressive intonations.
The author’s mother, four years after her stroke, laughing at the author’s hat
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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