The Mind's Eye

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I grew up in a household full of doctors and medical talk—my father and older brothers were general practitioners, and my mother was a surgeon. A lot of the dinner-table conversation was inevitably about medicine, but the talk was never just about “cases.” A patient might present as a case of this or that, but in my parents’ conversation, cases became biographies, stories of people’s lives as they responded to illness or injury, stress or misfortune. Perhaps it was inevitable that I myself became both a physician and a storyteller.

When The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was published in 1985, it was given a very pleasant review by an eminent academic neurologist. The cases, he wrote, were fascinating, but he had one reservation: he thought I was being disingenuous in presenting patients as if I had come to them with no preconceptions, with little background knowledge of their conditions. Did I really read up on the scientific literature only after seeing a patient with a particular condition? Surely, he thought, I had started with a neurological theme in mind and simply sought out patients who exemplified it.

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