The purpose of this textbook is threefold:
(1) to teach how to conduct a neurologic examination,
(2) to review the anatomy and physiology for interpreting the examination, and (3) to show which laboratory tests help to clarify the clinical problem. This is not a differential diagnosis text or a systematic description of diseases.
Anyone who sets out to write a textbook should place the manuscript on one knee and a student on the other. When the student squirms, sighs, or gives a wrong answer, the author has erred. He should correct it right then, before the ink dries. That is the way I have written this text, on the basis of feedback from the students.
The peril of student-on-the-knee teaching is that, even though the student moves his lips, the words and voice remain the teacher’s. To escape from ventriloquism, my text relies strongly on self-observation and induction. First, you learn to observe yourself, not as Narcissus, but as a sample of every man. Whenever possible, you study living flesh, its look, its feel, and its responses. Why study a textbook picture to learn the range of ocular movements when you can hold up a hand mirror? Why memorize the laws of diplopia if you can do a simple experiment on yourself whenever you need to refresh your memory? In the best tradition of science, these techniques supplant the printed word as the source of knowledge. The text becomes a way of extending your own perceptions, of looking at the world through the eyes of experience.
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