The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfu...
The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances. —IVY MCKENZIE
The old man suddenly became intent, his brows knitted, his lips pursed. He stood motionless, in deep thought, presenting the picture that I love to see: a patient in the actual moment of discovery — h...
The leg incident taught me in a way which I could not, perhaps, have learned otherwise about how one’s body and the space around one are mapped in the brain and how this central mapping can be profoun...
The last scene of Michael’s life was played out in a hospital emergency room, waiting for the operation which this time, he thought, would probably take his leg. He was lying on a stretcher when he su...
The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear—she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything—she...
The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other ways, because this culture is so different: so completely sun-oriented, sky-oriented, wind- and...
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessy to the will of of others is not, for human behavior alway...
The Allegory of the Wolf Boy (At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity).
That which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is not part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no where.
That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even dissociations) that people h...
That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning—a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy—was ignored or bypassed; care was purely mechanical and medical.
Temple is a hero now to many in the autism community around the world, widely admired for forcing all of us to see autism and Asperger’s not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of bein...
Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and s...
Similar considerations arise with regard to recovery and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or cr...
She hoped I would send her some of my papers on neurology, of which I’ll understand not one word, but will glow with loving pride at my ridiculous, brilliant and altogether delightful nephew.
She has no words, and we lack words too. And society lacks words, and sympathy, for such states.
She had an intense feeling for structure, the way things were put together – whether they were human bodies, or plants, or scientific instruments or machines.
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past;(...).We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recall...