Tuesday, January 15, 2002

It was a disappointment to find that so much of A Leg to Stand On had appeared, in virtually the same form, in other publications and that I'd read big chunks before, essentially unchanged. The best parts of the books had to do with the U.K. hospital system. I never become ill without becoming deathly ill. Certainly my experience of being confined to a hospital in England is right up there tied with having a large private room in the old Yale Infirmary on Prospect Street. I think that Sacks was fooling himself about the nature of his problem, which he presents in terms of being a disorder strictly of the nervous system. I was reminded of Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. He characterizes himself as suffering from depression, when it seems (to me, at least) that he's obviously suffering from alcoholism.

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