Footnotes

• Competing interests None.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

• ↵i Valentine Logue, their neurosurgical colleague on the ward above, used to ask junior physicians if they saw anything ‘wrong’ about his face—and only then would we realise that there was something odd about his eyes: one of his pupils was much larger than the other. We speculated endlessly as to why this was so, but Logue never enlightened us.

• ii Kremer wrote: I was asked to see a puzzling patient on the cardiology ward. He had atrial fibrillation and had thrown off a large embolus giving him a left hemiplegia, and I was asked to see him because he constantly fell out of bed at night, for which the cardiologists could find no reason. When I asked him what happened at night he said quite openly that when he woke up in the night he always found that there was a dead, cold, hairy leg in bed with him, which he could not understand but could not tolerate and he, therefore, with his good arm and leg pushed it out of bed and naturally, of course, the rest of him followed. He was such an excellent example of this complete loss of awareness of his hemiplegic limb but, interestingly enough, I could not get him to tell me whether his own leg on that side was in bed with him because he was so caught up with the unpleasant foreign leg that was there.

  I quoted this passage of Kremer's letter when I had occasion to describe a similar case (“The Man Who Fell Out of Bed”) in The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.