The story of a terrible brain injuryNörobilim
Zazetsky is severely wounded by shell fragments in 1942, with massive damage to the left occipito-parietal region of his brain (interweaving with the narrative voices of Zazetsky and Luria are a number of “digressions” on neuroanatomy and cerebral function, so lucid and simple they cannot be bettered). This fragmentation affects all aspects of his life: He suffers an intolerable, constantly shifting visual chaos – objects in his visual fields (what remains of his visual fields) are unstable, glimmer fitfully, get displaced, so that everything appears in a state of flux. It is impossible for him to see, or even imagine, the right side of his body – the sense of “a right side” has disappeared both from the outer world and his own self. He is subject to continual, almost unimaginable, uncertainties about his body: sometimes he thinks parts of it have changed, that his head has become inordinately large, his torso extremely small, his legs displaced... Sometimes he thinks his right leg is somewhere above his shoulder, possibly above his head. He also forgets how parts of his body function – thus, when he needs to defecate, he cannot remember his own anus.
But above all, and infinitely more serious than all these, are the devastations of memory, language, and thought: “My memory’s a blank. I can’t think of a single word... Whatever I do remember is scattered, broken down into disconnected bits and pieces.” With this he feels like “some terrible baby,” or like someone bewitched or lost in a hideous dream, although “A dream can’t last this long or be so monotonous. That means I’ve actually been experiencing this all these years... How horrible this illness is!” At times he even believes he has been killed, because the old Zazetsky, his former self and his world, has been “lost.” But yet, because his frontal lobes are intact, he is wholly aware of his situation and capable of the most determined and resourceful efforts to improve it. The book is a story of these efforts, in which patient and physician combine in the most intimate, creative, and involved relationship, a sense of relationship beyond anything in The Mnemonist, a relationship – never mentioned, invisible, but ubiquitous – which is the very essence of Medicine, of Care, and which suffuses this book with a special warmth, feeling, and moral beauty; it is a story of these efforts no less than a story of damage and deficits. Thus it
becomes a story of survival—survival, and more, a kind of transcendence.
The Man With a Shattered World: The History of a Brain WoundA. R. Luria · Harvard University Press · 19871 okunma
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