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Brain 2005 128(10):2470-2473; doi:10.1093/brain/awh633
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book review

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The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Neurology and literature







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 José 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 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Alastair Wilkins and Simon Shorvon

National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London


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