intensity and is able to tolerate treatment at different times post-stroke. Intensity of treatment after a stroke should be dependent on the person's motivation, stamina, and tolerance for therapy. Outcomes If the symptoms of aphasia last longer than two or three months after a stroke, a complete recovery is unlikely. However, it is important to note that some people continue to improve over a period of years and even decades. Improvement is a slow process that usually involves both helping the individual and family understand the nature of aphasia and learning compensatory strategies for communicating. After a traumatic brain injury (TBI) or cerebrovascular accident (CVA), the brain undergoes several healing and re-organization processes, which may result in improved language function. This is referred to as spontaneous recovery. Spontaneous recovery is the natural recovery the brain makes without treatment, and the brain begins to reorganize and change in order to recover. There are several factors that contribute to a person's chance of recovery caused by stroke, including stroke size and location. Age, sex, and education have not been found to be very predictive. There is also research pointing to damage in the left hemisphere healing more effectively than the right. Specific to aphasia, spontaneous recovery varies among affected people and may not look the same in everyone, making it difficult to predict recovery. Though some cases of Wernicke's aphasia have shown greater improvements than more mild forms of aphasia, people with Wernicke's aphasia may not reach as high a level of speech abilities as those with mild forms of aphasia. History The first recorded case of aphasia is from an Egyptian papyrus, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, which details speech problems in a person with a traumatic brain injury to the temporal lobe. During the second half of the 19th century, aphasia was a major focus for scientists and philosophers who were working in the beginning stages of the field of psychology. In medical research, speechlessness was described as an incorrect prognosis, and there was no assumption that underlying language complications existed. Broca and his colleagues were some of the first to write about aphasia, but Wernicke was the first credited to have written extensively about aphasia being a disorder that contained comprehension difficulties. Despite claims of who reported on aphasia first, it was F.J. Gall that gave the first full description of aphasia after studying wounds to the brain, as well