Abstract
Depictions of neurological illnesses in literature prompt questions as to how such representations can inform lay readers about the realities of neurological disease and what relevance such books have for the neurologist. Medicine and literature make regular bedfellows. Characterizations of disease abound in fiction and serve either to embellish descriptive prose, to illustrate elements of the human condition or, perhaps more interestingly, to provide social or political allegory. A disease, after all, is a deviation from normality and may thus be a synonym for a whole manner of human struggles. A fictional plague in a mid-European town is the basis for political commentary in Albert Camus' The Plague . An unusual form of epidemic ‘white blindness’ allows Jose Saramago to study late twentieth century society in his novel Blindness in which chaos descends on a fictional community revealing the true nature of society's sightlessness. The disturbance of vision, one of the most fundamental of neurological functions, is perhaps the commonest of allegories used in literature. Neurology lends itself well to such tales for the brain is the seat of knowledge, the ‘soul’ and creativity. Many an author has written on how creativity and freedom of expression can be dulled by various forms of brain manipulation. In Yevgeny Zamyatin's futuristic novel, We , free will is suppressed by surgical removal of imagination; and in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange , the Ludovico technique is used to ‘brainwash’ miscreant youths. Social faults are again highlighted in Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog in which neuroendocrine tissue from a human is transferred into a dog that subsequently takes on a corrupt persona. Such illnesses and neurological treatments are fictitious, but what of the depiction of real illnesses in literature? Oliver Sacks popularized neurological science with descriptions of various disorders in The Man who …
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