Rezso Balint and his most celebrated case
M. Husain and J. Stein
University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford, England.
In 1907, Rezso Balint (1874-1929), a young Hungarian physician, recorded
observations he had made on a patient who suffered from a remarkable
constellation of symptoms--fixation of gaze, neglect of objects in the
visual surround, and misreaching--following damage to the posterior
parietal lobes. Although Balint's syndrome, the name now given to these
disorders of attention and visuomotor control, is well established in the
neurologic literature, there remain problems of interpretation. Balint's
own attempts to understand exactly what was wrong with his patient offer a
unique insight into the nature of neurologic thought at the beginning of
this century.
