Free Man Who MIstook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

titled On Doubt, for it is marked by doubting, no less than affirming. Specifically, he wonders-and one in turn may wonder whether these thoughts were perhaps incited by his working with patients, in a hospital, in the war- he wonders whether there might be situations or conditions which take away the certainty of the body, which do give one grounds to doubt's one body, perhaps indeed to lose one's entire body in total doubt. This thought seems to haunt his last book like a nightmare.
       Christina was a strapping young woman of twenty-seven, given to hockey and riding, self-assured, robust, in body and mind. She had two young children, and worked as a computer programmer at home. She was intelligent and cultivated, fond of the ballet, and of the Lakeland poets (but not, I would think, of Wittgenstein). She had an active, full life-had scarcely known a day's illness. Somewhat to her surprise, after an attack of abdominal pain, she was found to have gallstones, and removal of the gallbladder was advised.
       She was admitted to hospital three days before the operation date, and placed on an antibiotic for microbial prophylaxis. This was purely routine, a precaution, no complications of any sort being expected at all. Christina understood this, and being a sensible soul had no great anxieties.
       The day before surgery Christina, not usually given to fancies or dreams, had a disturbing dream of peculiar intensity. She was swaying wildly, in her dream, very unsteady on her feet, could hardly feel the ground beneath her, could hardly feel anything in
       her hands, found them flailing to and fro, kept dropping whatever she picked up.
       She was distressed by this dream. ('I never had one like it,' she said. 'I can't get it out of my mind.')-so distressed that we requested an opinion from the psychiatrist. 'Pre-operative anxiety,' he said. 'Quite natural, we see it all the time.'

   But later that day the dream came true. Christina did find herself very unsteady on her feet, with awkward flailing movements, and dropping things from her hands.
       The psychiatrist was again called-he seemed vexed at the call, hut also, momentarily, uncertain and bewildered. 'Anxiety hysteria,' he now snapped, in a dismissive tone. 'Typical conversion symptoms-you see them all the while.'
       But the day of surgery Christina was still worse. Standing was impossible-unless she looked down at her feet. She could hold nothing in her hands, and they 'wandered'-unless she kept an eye on them. When she reached out for something, or tried to feed herself, her hands would miss, or overshoot wildly, as if some essential control or coordination was gone.
       She could scarcely even sit up-her body 'gave way'. Her face was oddly expressionless and slack, her jaw fell open, even her vocal posture was gone.
       'Something awful's happened,' she mouthed, in a ghostly flat voice. 'I can't feel my body. I feel weird-disembodied.'
       This was an amazing thing to hear, confounded, confounding. 'Disembodied'-was she crazy? But what of her physical state then? The collapse of tone and muscle posture, from top to toe; the wandering of her hands, which she seemed unaware of; the flailing and overshooting, as if she were receiving no information from the periphery, as if the control loops for tone and movement had catastrophically broken down.
       'It's a strange statement,' I said to the residents. 'It's almost impossible to imagine what might provoke such a statement.'
       'But it's hysteria, Dr Sacks-didn't the psychiatrist say so?'
       'Yes, he did. But have you ever seen a hysteria like this? Think phenomenologically-take what you see as genuine phenomenon, in which her state-of-body and state-of-mind are not fictions, but
       a psychophysical whole. Could anything give such a picture of undermined body and mind?
       'I'm not testing you,' I added. 'I'm as bewildered as you are. I've never seen or imagined anything