ABSTRACT
In consonance with observations on adult patients, it was found that children who showed all four Josef Gerstmann deficits invariably failed other task performances, leading the authors to doubt the usefulness of the “developmental Gerstmann syndrome” as a behavioral description. In 1930, Gerstmann enlarged the syndrome to include right-left disorientation and acalculia, thus establishing the combination of deficits that came to be known as the Gerstmann syndrome. Later M. Critchley expressed the opinion that both the spatial and aphasic types of acalculia find a place in the Gerstmann syndrome, and he added that in all probability some cases show a pure anarithmetia. Certainly the more general term mathematical disability is more appropriate as a designation for a failure in performance that may be due to disabilities of quite different types and at different levels of information processing. Anarithmetia is a relatively uncommon disability.
