- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 6 edition (23 Aug 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330325108
- ISBN-13: 978-0330325103
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 261,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
A Leg to Stand On
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Product Description
Review
'As well as raising profound questions about the physical basis of identity, Sacks touches on a long literary impulse to unpick the causes and effects of debilitating illness in his memoir, A Leg to Stand On, to be re-issued in September.' --Independent
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
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Product Description
By the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
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First Sentence
Saturday the 24th started overcast and sullen, but there was promise of fine weather later in the day. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Saturday the 24th started overcast and sullen, but there was promise of fine weather later in the day. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Dr Sacks, an extraordinary neurologist with a persistently enquiring mind, has used his experience of a seriously injured leg to offer his readers a fascinating and informative story. It is a deeply personal account told with unstinting openness.
Dr Sacks quickly engages his readers, sharing with them the experience of being one moment happily and enthusiastically climbing upwards and the next a helpless cripple alone on the mountain, and subsequently his long, painful and arduous struggle to survive. He is rescued and hospitalised but this is only the beginning of his story.
This experience, for Dr. Sacks, is a learning opportunity. To understand patienthood one must first be a patient. He describes the depersonalising experience of the admission procedure, the shrinking, paralysing effect of remaining for 18 days, bed bound with his leg in a cast, in a windowless room and the lack of a listening ear as he agonizes over his strangely alien and unresponsive limb. Feelings of self respect and self integrity are lost in this 1970s hospital.
Dr. Sacks also recounts his profound neurological experience. His painstaking observations and reflections lead him to express the need to progress to a model of neurology which acknowledges that our nerves and brains are ours and their perceptions and memories represent our own personal space and are intensely subjective.
Dr Sacks quickly engages his readers, sharing with them the experience of being one moment happily and enthusiastically climbing upwards and the next a helpless cripple alone on the mountain, and subsequently his long, painful and arduous struggle to survive. He is rescued and hospitalised but this is only the beginning of his story.
This experience, for Dr. Sacks, is a learning opportunity. To understand patienthood one must first be a patient. He describes the depersonalising experience of the admission procedure, the shrinking, paralysing effect of remaining for 18 days, bed bound with his leg in a cast, in a windowless room and the lack of a listening ear as he agonizes over his strangely alien and unresponsive limb. Feelings of self respect and self integrity are lost in this 1970s hospital.
Dr. Sacks also recounts his profound neurological experience. His painstaking observations and reflections lead him to express the need to progress to a model of neurology which acknowledges that our nerves and brains are ours and their perceptions and memories represent our own personal space and are intensely subjective.
39 of 52 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In hospital after a climbing accident, Sacks is revulsed to find a corpse leg in his hospital bed. He throws it out - and swiftly follows it onto the floor! Sacks describes from personal and patient experience the distressing problem of losing your body sense for a limb that you are still attached to. A touching journey into the land of spiritual and physical amputation.
Format:Kindle Edition
This is a very interesting study of loss of proprioception. I have suffered from this, so understand it well. It is a little archaic in style and probably only for medics or sufferers, but is the only book I have discovered on this subject.
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