Nineteenth-century Accounts of the Nature of the Lexicon and Semantics: Riddles Posed by the Case of Johann Voit

The beer brewer Johann Voit is probably the most intensively investigated individual in the classical German neuropsychological literature. Two habilitation and at least two doctoral theses have been based on his case. Publications on him span the period from 1884 to 1907. The amount of discussion concerning Voit is equalled only by that conducted about Goldstein’s and Gelb’s case Schn., in whom the re-evaluation by a commission more than 20 years later suggested that he probably had feigned or exaggerated symptoms in order to gain compensation as a veteran (Jung, 1949).