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my memory, sir, is like a garbage-heap
Sunday, December 4th, 2005 11:42 pmi mentioned that over thanksgiving i finished oliver sacks's the man who mistook his wife for a hat: and other clinical tales. the tales are clinical, but the tone isn't: they read like character sketches and short stories; he draws a complete world around each patient and makes them people. it's obvious in everything he says and in the way he approached this collection of stories that he has concerns about these people whom he's known and treated and studied—not just that he is concerned about them, but that he thinks, unceasingly, about what every condition means, what it's effects are on the person in toto, and, above all, what it means for all of us, what it reveals about the brains and minds and constitutions of everyone whose brain structures are healthy and intact—not only the neurological implications, but the philosophical and practical ones. he talks about a lot of people with a lot of different conditions, and he asks as much as he tells about each one—what has the patient lost? what has he gained? how has his life changed, and how can we relate to his experience of the world? can we relate to it?
one or more of the writers for house had to have read this book, or at least stumbled across Cupid's Disease, the story of a woman—natasha k., ninety years old—who presented with feelings of "friskiness": she felt alive, young, playful, started taking interest in young men; it was wonderful, she said, but unnatural. she diagnosed herself with syphilis, which she'd contracted when she'd been in a brothel in salonika nearly seventy years ago. when the diagnosis was confirmed, she said she didn't know that she wanted it treated: 'I guessed I had Cupid's, that's why I came to you. I don't want it to get worse, that would be awful; but I don't want it cured—that would be just as bad. I wasn't fully alive until the wrigglies got me. Do you think you could keep it just as it is?' luckily, the course was clear, as treatment with penicillin would halt the course of the disease, but be unable to reverse its effects.
i read with post-it strips on hand, ready to mark the passages that struck me most forcibly, that i'd want to remember. these are behind the cut. i copied down the first one in its entirety because it reads like a horror story, chilling and creepy and fascinating.
( excerpts )
one or more of the writers for house had to have read this book, or at least stumbled across Cupid's Disease, the story of a woman—natasha k., ninety years old—who presented with feelings of "friskiness": she felt alive, young, playful, started taking interest in young men; it was wonderful, she said, but unnatural. she diagnosed herself with syphilis, which she'd contracted when she'd been in a brothel in salonika nearly seventy years ago. when the diagnosis was confirmed, she said she didn't know that she wanted it treated: 'I guessed I had Cupid's, that's why I came to you. I don't want it to get worse, that would be awful; but I don't want it cured—that would be just as bad. I wasn't fully alive until the wrigglies got me. Do you think you could keep it just as it is?' luckily, the course was clear, as treatment with penicillin would halt the course of the disease, but be unable to reverse its effects.
i read with post-it strips on hand, ready to mark the passages that struck me most forcibly, that i'd want to remember. these are behind the cut. i copied down the first one in its entirety because it reads like a horror story, chilling and creepy and fascinating.
( excerpts )