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Very early in the attempt to identify nosological units, researchers accumulated numerous incidental observations on the facial expressions and gestures of their patients. These unsystematic clinical observations were used as evidence for or against one or another hypothesis. The limits of this debate are often difficult to define, however, because two other questions regularly intervened: unity versus diversity of aphasia and localizationism versus antilocalizationism. The clearest affirmation of the thesis that aphasia is merely one of the consequences of a more general symbolic disorder is found in Finkelburg’s paper (1870: translation with commentary in Duffy & Liles, 1979). Finkelburg presented five cases of aphasia that manifested, along with linguistic disturbances, different kinds of impairments: memory loss, dementia, hemiplegia, and, principally, a deficit in the use of symbols. For the last impairment, various …