Abstract
In one of his short stories, “The Plattner Story”, H. G. Wells tells about a secondary school teacher who was flung into the fourth dimension following an explosion caused by a chemical substance. After some time, the teacher managed to return to our world. It was then observed that he was transformed. As a consequence of his stay in the fourth dimension, the left and right halves of his body had been interchanged. His heart was now in the right side of his chest, while his liver was in the left side of his abdominal cavity. Indeed, all of his asymmetrical organs such as the duodenum, the caeccum, and the appendix had been transposed. In other words, he had what is sometimes called situs inversus. The transposition affected his paired body parts too. What used to be his right hand was now his left, and the same was true of his eyes, ears, and legs. As a result of the displacement, Plattner, who used to be right-handed, could now write only with his left hand. Moreover, with this hand, he wrote from right to left, i.e., he produced mirror-writing.
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Lebrun, Y., Devreux, F., Leleux, C. (1989). Mirror-Writing. In: Aaron, P.G., Joshi, R.M. (eds) Reading and Writing Disorders in Different Orthographic Systems. NATO ASI Series, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1041-6_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1041-6_21
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