A case of 'pure' word blindness.

The concept of 'pure' word blindness is still a matter of controversy. Some authors maintain that it is a selective asymbolia (Holmes, 1950; Symonds, 1953; Brain, 1955) while others (Critchley, 1953) consider it to be an aphasic disorder. Beringer and Stein (1930) attribute its mechanism to some pathological functional lability of the visual system. Martin (1954) assumes that it is due to visual disorientation, and Warrington and Zangwill (1957) ascribe it to disorders of ocular motility. Alexic disorders have been named either according to semiotic criteria, for example, pure word blindness, pure optic alexia, or to pathological criteria related to the site of the lesion, for example, subcortical word blindness (Wernicke, 1886) or occipital blindness. At the same time, a review of the literature on this subject illustrates the great variety of techniques used for clinical examination, and the lack of a standard clinical examination of alexia has made a synthesis of this problem as well as drawing general conclusions very difficult (Leischner, 1957). We consider this report of a case of 'pure' word blindness to be of some interest: it was studied by means of various classical tests and also by a standard examination for alexia worked out at the Institute of Neurology, Bucharest, by Weigl and Fradis (1960).