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RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR
It's rightly said that nature's imagination
is richer than ours. But, we ought to make an effort -- an
attempt that's essentially noble. To draw an example: the
study of disease; or, not being distinctly human is also tantamount
to being human.
The idea of illness
for the physician in conventional or integrative medicine
demands the acquisition of identity -- the inner worlds that
patients under the spell of illness often create.
More importantly,
it may also often be surmised that the exploration of deeply
altered selves and worlds is not one that can be fully made
in the consulting room. Which only explains why the problem
for the neurologist, to cull an exemplar, is doubly formidable
-- primarily because
neurological patients often travel into the unimaginable.
Neurologist and writer par excellence Oliver Sacks'
An Anthropologist On Mars is a veritable fount of wisdom.
It encompasses in-depth, absorbing portraits of metamorphosis
brought about by neurological chance.
Sacks' gem details the struggles of
a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette syndrome
[TS] -- an illness characterised by convulsive movements, repetition
of others' words or actions, and the involuntary utterance
of obscenities -- unless he is operating; of an artist who
loses all sense of colour in a car crash, but finds a new
sensitivity and creative power in black and white; and, of
an autistic professor who cannot fathom the simplest social
exchange or conversation betwixt fellow human beings, but
has, nevertheless, built a remarkable career out of her intuitive
entente of animal behaviour, receptivity, and form.
Sacks, who has been at the cutting
edge of hospital practice for over three decades, took off
his white coat to explore his subjects' lives. In the process,
he also found his nirvana -- a naturalist examining
rare forms of life, "in part," as he puts it, "like
an anthropologist, a neuroanthropologist, in the field -- but,
most of all like a physician, called here and there, to make
house calls at the far borders of human experience."
Neurological diseases cannot "conduct"
one to other modes of being, howsoever disoriented they maybe
to our own way of thinking -- even if they develop virtues
and beauties of their own, whatever the specific type. Sacks' profound examination, therefore, highlights a sound
perspective on the way our brains construct our individual
worlds. It not only provokes a novel sense of awe at who we
are, but it also instructs a compelling reconstruction of the
mental acts we so often take for granted.
Sacks' work is meticulous. It traces
the historical paradigms of TS from the time of Aretaeus of
Cappadocia, who recorded the condition, two thousand years
ago, to Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist,
and protégé of Jean Charcot, and also friend of Sigmund
Freud, who delineated the disorder in 1885.
Any disease, writes
Sacks, introduces a duality into life -- an "it"
with its own needs, demands, and limitations. With TS, the
"it" takes the form of explicit compulsions, a multitude
of impulsions, and inclinations, where one is driven to do
this or that against one's will, or in deference to the alien
will of "it." In so doing, Sacks quotes Foucault,
on what must be regarded as an inter-subjective approach,
aside from the employment of the objective malady: "…[into]
the interior of morbid consciousness, [trying] to see the
pathological world with the eyes of the patient himself."
Contends Sacks: "Sickness implies contraction of life,
but such contractions do not have to occur… Nearly all
my patients, so it seems to me, whatever their problems, reach
out of life -- and, not only despite their conditions, but often
because of them, and even with [their] aid." How
persons with such radical adaptations co-operate is nothing
short of a miracle!
In Sacks' words: "… [The] brain's remarkable
plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations,
not least in the special [and, often desperate] circumstances
of neural and sensory mishap has come to dominate my own perception
of patients and their lives."
His is, therefore, a valid riposte.
It is, therefore, de rigueur
for us to redefine the very concepts of "health"
and "disease," thanks to the ability of the organism
to create a new organisation and order -- one that fits into
its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than any
rigidly defined "norm." In other words, it is a
connotation beyond what we perceive as "black" and
"white."
An Anthropologist On Mars is a
spellbinding book. It is recommended reading for everyone
-- with or without a smattering of medical lexicon. Its
sublime idiom, or message, is simple: being not
"distinctly" human, in general phraseology, is no
less
tantamount to being human.
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