Evanston: love, lobotomies, and Shakespeare’s Tremor
Evanston: love, lobotomies, and Shakespeare’s Tremor
Carol once lived in the “Love Story” house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where part of the 1970 movie, LOVE STORY, based on the Erich Segal novel, was filmed. Novel and film are best known for a single line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Last week I read something that I find charming and which may even provide some substance to Mr. Segal’s assertion:
A couple madly in love for whom we did brain scans, broke up.
I am sorry for them; but after looking at their scans I predicted the break-up. The data are piling up. If you suspend negative evaluations of your romantic partner (it's unconscious), if activity in the brain goes way down in negative judgment regions in the prefrontal cortex right behind the eyes, you've got a shot at a long-term relationship. Some couple therapists emphasize that criticism is one of the key factors that kills relationships. One neurologist joked that being in love is like having a lobotomy. Truer than he thinks. The decrease in brain activity is located in lobotomy land.
So, you may never have to say you’re sorry to your lover because as far as you are concerned, he or she has had a lobotomy.
Still I think saying you’re sorry when you are is a good idea.
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Not entirely unrelated to the above is SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH in which Dr. John J. Ross of the Harvard Medical School, not far from the Love Story House, discusses the medical conditions of ten famous writers of the English language, though I suspect writers in other languages may occasionally have been ill, too.
The chapter on William Shakespeare is admittedly speculative. Very little is certain about the peerless poet’s life. That he had a tremor caused by syphilis is based in part on deterioration of his handwriting toward the end of his life and the perhaps excessive and knowledgeable references to venereal disease in his writings.
While a cure for syphilis was not found until last century, in 1539 a Spanish physician observed that high fevers often slowed and sometimes even halted the disease. Only recently has science determined that high heat does in fact block an enzyme essential to the disease’s progression. In Shakespeare’s time, body temperature was raised by surrounding the infected with blankets and hot bricks, immersion in scalding baths, or sitting in tubs something like a modern sauna. All of which may actually have done some good.
However, one of the recurring themes throughout the book is that until the last hundred years, and maybe less, going to a doctor was likely to do more harm than good. I know that doctors of medicine in at least three countries read this journal from time to time and I am not impugning their profession which now routinely performs wonders.
In addition to Shakespeare, we are told about John Milton, whose blindness may have been caused by detached retinas, Jonathan Swift, the Bronte sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, Jack London, James Joyce, and George Orwell.
Of these, five had their health damaged, some fatally, by British boarding schools. The Bronte Sisters and George Orwell contracted diseases of the lung there; and Swift, Yeats, and Orwell were damaged psychologically. Perhaps there is something to be said for home schooling.
The discussions of all the writers, their medical conditions, the treatments available during their lives, is all told very well. I found the book fascinating.
While reading it I could not help but wonder what diagnoses, in addition to half blindness, could have been made of me. Perhaps it is just as well that, until my recent eye problems, I avoided doctors almost all my life.
Friday, December 7, 2012