Attention has been recently called to this special aspect of the subject in a minutely detailed article in the _Archivio Italiano per le Malatie Nervose_, of September 1890, by Dr. D’Abundo Guiseppe, of the University of Pisa. The inquiry was suggested to the Pisan professor by the peculiar case of a left-handed patient, thus stated by him: “I was treating electrically a gentleman, thirty-three years of age, who had been affected for two years with difficulty in writing, and which proved to be a typical case of the spasm called _writer’s cramp_. The fact to which I desire to draw attention is that the gentleman was left-handed, and had been so from his birth, so that he preferentially used the left hand except in writing, as he had learned to write with the right hand. He was a person of good intellect and superior culture; and he had taught himself to sketch and paint with the left hand. Under the electric treatment he improved, but in view of the liability to relapse, I advised him to commence practising writing with the left hand; more especially as he is left-handed. But he informed me that in the first attempts made by him he felt, in addition to the difficulty; that they produced painful sensations in the right arm, as if he were writing with it. Wishing to master the facts, I caused him to write in my presence; and I observed that, instead of commencing from left to right, he automatically proceeded from right to left. At my request, he began with the greatest readiness and rapidity to write some lines which I dictated to him. What struck me was the rapidity with which he wrote, the regularity of the writing, and the ease with which, with unruled paper, he went on writing from right to left. He assured me that he had never before made any attempt to write in that way; and he was himself really surprised.”[7] [7] _Archivio Italiano_, Milan, September 1890, “Su di alcune particolarità della scrittura dei mancini,” p. 298.