ABSTRACT
As Young and van de Wal point out in Chapter 3, studies of patients with a profound inability to recognise previously familiar faces were reported at intervals throughout the 19th century by Wigan (1844), Hughlings Jackson (1872), Charcot and Bernard (1883), and Wilbrand (1892). It was not until 1947, however, that a unique label for this condition was provided. In that year Joachim Bodamer reported his observations made on three brain-injured German soldiers whom he had treated a few years earlier. All three patients revealed pronounced impairments in ability to process facial information and Bodamer gave his paper the title “Die Prosopagnosie”, derived from classical Greek and meaning agnosia for faces. Indeed he believed that he had isolated a new subcategory of agnosia-one which was confined to recognising faces. I shall return to this issue later but first let me describe the three cases described in detail by Bodamer. (More complete descriptions are given in the English translation of his paper which Melanie Florence and I published in 1990; Ellis & Florence, 1990.)
Case 1
S. a 24-year-old, was completely blind for a few weeks after his brain injury. When his sight gradually recovered he was found to be achromatopsic. He was also agnosic for some objects and revealed signs of simultagnosia with complex pictures. In addition the patient S. was found to be alexic. His most notable deficit, however, was prosopagnosia, which Bodamer defined as “a disorder of the recognition of faces and, in a wider sense, of expressions”. S. revealed what Bodamer believed to be the crucial dysfunction, namely integrating the separate facial features to form the whole physiognomy.
