ABSTRACT
Ever since the days of horse-and-buggy practice, when a doctor had much time for speculation and reflection between his visits, the clinician has made his own peculiar approach to the truth. He carries at the back of his mind certain unsolved problems in his field of special interest, and he stumbles unexpectedly on clues to their solution, constructing his own tentative hypotheses. In that place at the back of the mind that is reserved for wonder, he should be, to the best of his ability, a pathologist, an anatomist, and a physiologist. Thus, when disease or accident presents to him the perfect experiment, he has a mind prepared and can, perhaps, ask the question and get the answer for which the problem waits, doing this before the fleeting chance is gone. Retrograde amnesia is such a problem.
