Introduction

Students have always found clinical neurology difficult to understand. There are many reasons for this, quite apart from the failings of their teachers. Clinical diagnosis, at least the anatomical part of it, is heavily dependent upon an adequate, if rudimentary, knowledge of human neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, which is often learnt by rote and then forgotten by the time the student enters the neurological ward. Perhaps the greatest difficulty has been that neurology is full of irrelevant facts. Like the minutiae of gross anatomy, the neurological examination and a differential diagnosis can be drawn out to such an extent that the original aim is forgotten. The student becomes confused by a wealth of irrelevant detail, and so fails to grasp the main point.