ABSTRACT
Jean Iris Murdoch (IM) was one of the most acclaimed novelists of the 20th century. Born in Dublin in 1919 into a middle-class protestant family, she was educated at Badminton School and then Somerville College Oxford, from where she graduated with a first in Greats in 1942. IM agreed to be examined at her home in Oxford by a research team from the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in November 1996, and soon afterwards travelled to London for a volumetric MRI scan at the Institute of Neurology. The latter revealed established atrophy, with a posterior emphasis and undoubted hippocampal involvement, though—unusually for Alzheimer’s—the volume loss was somewhat asymmetric. IM’s clinical profile could, therefore, be summarised as a mixed picture of verbal and nonverbal memory deficits coupled with profound semantic and visuospatial impairments—a profile entirely compatible with the early-to-middle stages of an Alzheimer type dementia.
