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The significance of this book by Dr. Kurt Goldstein is given in two passages, one in the preface to the German edition, the other in the introduction. "The intention to write this book goes back many years. It dates to that time of the World War when it became my special task as a physician to take under my medical care a great many patients with lesions of the brain." "Hitherto, the aim of biological research has been to divide the organism, like any physical object, into parts, and then to reconstruct it. But this procedure has yielded few satisfactory results either in respect to the physical or the psychic phenomena of an organism. Dissatisfaction with these results has been one of my motives in restating the problem... The basic motive, however, was not primarily a dissatisfaction with the theoretical results, but with their inadequacy in medical practice." "The Organism"