The Forgetting: Understanding Alzheimer’s: A Biography of a Disease
Winner of the 2002 BMA Popular Medicine Book Prize: This is a haunting literary and scientific examination of Alzheimer’s disease and the race to find a cure.‘A truly remarkable book – the definitive work on Alzheimer’s, both in social and medical terms, “The Forgetting” is incisive, humane, never ponderous, full of dry humour and brilliantly written with quiet, unpretentious authority. As a layman with personal experience of “caring” for an Alzheimer’s sufferer I am well aware of the stages of the disease and its prognosis and ending. Shenk is excellent on all these, and in his reflections on memory and the individual, and the individual’s response to the progress of the disease. I can’t imagine a book on Alzheimer’s being better researched and understood, or presented with greater sympathy.’ John BayleyIn 1906 Alois Alzheimer dissected and examined the cerebral cortex of Auguste D’s brain and became the first scientist in medical history to link a specific brain pathology to behavioural changes. The disease named after him, turns otherwise active and healthy people into living ghosts. It is a rare condition for those in their 40s and 50s but 10% of the 65+ population suffers from it and 50% of the 85+. It is longevity’s revenge and as the baby boom generation drifts into its elderly years the number of Alzheimer’s victims is expected to quadruple, making it the fastest-growing disease in developed countries.As Adam Phillips writes in his foreword ‘This remarkable book will radically change our notions of looking after people and our assumptions about independence. Out of fear of mortality we have idealised health and youth and competence. “The Forgetting” reminds us among many other things that there is more to life than that.’Shenk’s history of Alzheimer’s is both poignant and scientific, grounded by the fundamental belief that memory forms the basis of our selves, our souls, and the meaning in our lives.
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THE FORGETTING
Understanding Alzheimer’s:
A Biography of a Disease
DAVID SHENK
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by Flamingo 2003
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002
First published in the US by Doubleday 2001
Copyright © David Shenk 2001
David Shenk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Several of the names and identifying characteristics
of the individuals depicted in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.
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Source ISBN: 9780006532088
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007439669 Version: 2016-09-09
For Lucy
CONTENTS
3. The God Who Forgot and the Man Who Could Not
7. Fumbling for the Name of My Wife
9. National Institute of Alzheimer’s
10. Ten Thousand Feet, at Ten O’Clock at Night
13. We Hope to Radio Back to Earth Images of Beauty Never Seen
LEAR: Does any here know me? This is not Lear.
Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied—Ha! Waking? ’Tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am?
FOOL: Lear’s shadow.
—William Shakespeare, King Lear
“When I was younger,” Mark Twain quipped near the end of his life, “I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.”
At age seventy-two, Twain’s memory and wit were intact. But behind his remark lay a grim recollection of another celebrated writer’s true decline. In December 1877, Twain had come to Boston at the invitation of William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, to satirize a group of Brahmin intellectuals. Among Twain’s targets that night was the father of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It was after midnight when Twain finally took to the floor at the Hotel Brunswick to spin his yarn. He told the venerable crowd about a lonely miner who had been victimized by three tramps claiming to be famous American writers. The literary outlaws stormed into the miner’s cabin, ate his beans and bacon, guzzled his whiskey, and stole his only pair of boots. They played cards and fought bitterly. One of the tramps called himself Emerson.
The point of the skit was to poke some harmless fun at Emerson by corrupting some of his noble expressions. As they played cards at the climax of the story, the Emerson hobo spat out contorted fragments of his poem “Brahma.” A mystical paean to immortality, the original included these stanzas:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
Twain twisted the verse into drunken poker banter:
I am the doubter and the doubt—
They reckon ill who leave me out,
They know not well the subtle ways I keep,
I pass and deal again.
An elegant master of spoof, Twain was revered around the world as the funniest living man. But on this important night, his material bombed. From the start. Twain drew only silence and quizzical looks, most prominently from Emerson himself. At the finish, Twain later recalled, there “fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch.” He was humiliated. Shortly afterward, he sent a letter of apology to Emerson.
Only then did Twain learn of the hidden backdrop to his performance: Emerson had been present only in body, not in mind. Emerson’s dead silence and flat affect, Twain discovered, was a function of neither offense nor boredom. As his daughter Ellen wrote to Twain in reply, it was simply that he had not understood a word of what Twain was saying.
