ABSTRACT

At the close of the 19th century the inability to correctly perform purposeful movements in response to command had been only superficially described as an aside in cases of aphasia. While the term apraxia had been coined by Steinthal as early as 1871, the presumed mechanism was really quite different than our understanding today. That is, it

was assumed in the late 1800s that the reason a patient may fail correctly to perform purposeful movements was that they were unable to recognise or fully appreciate the object/tool associated with the desired movement. That is, the movement failure in apraxia was assumed to result from motor “agnosia” or motor manifestations of asymbolia. How this would create an inability to move purposefully to command in the former explanation or to be unable to imitate gestures in the latter explanation is unclear but this was the conception commonly held at the time Hugo Liepmann presented his first paper on the topic of apraxia in 1900. It is cases described in this paper of 1900 and one that followed in 1905 that serve as the focus of this chapter.