Rezsö Bálint and his most celebrated case.

In 1907, Rezsö Bálint (1874-1929), a young Hungarian physician, recorded observations he had made on a patient who suffered from a remarkable constellation of symptoms--fixation of gaze, neglect of objects in the visual surround, and misreaching--following damage to the posterior parietal lobes. Although Bálint's syndrome, the name now given to these disorders of attention and visuomotor control, is well established in the neurologic literature, there remain problems of interpretation. Bálint's own attempts to understand exactly what was wrong with his patient offer a unique insight into the nature of neurologic thought at the beginning of this century.