Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Difficulty in the recognition of faces as a symptom in patients with cerebral disease is not a new observation. It was first described by Charcot1in 1883 and by Wilbrand2in 1892. Case reports alluding to the phenomenon were later published by Millian,3Hoff and Pötzl4and Donini.5However, it was Bodamer6who definitively described the deficit in 1947 on the basis of 3 personally observed cases, and who proposed the name "prosopagnosia" for this special type of visual agnosia. Realizing that "prosopagnosia" is often merely one aspect of the clinical picture of severe object or form agnosia, Bodamer took pains to emphasize that this is not always the case and that recognition of faces may be preserved in patients with object agnosia. In this connection, he cited the cases of Lissauer7and Nielsen.8Ajuriaguerra and one of us (H.H.) recently observed
Hécaen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.