Awakenings Quotes
"We may expect to find such ideas most intense in those who are enduring extremities of suffering, sickness, and anguish."
"The notion of such mystical, life-giving, sacramental remedies gives rise to innumerable cults and fads, and to enthusiasms of a particularly extravagant and intransigent type."
"Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?"
"We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems."
"For all of us have a basic, intuitive feeling that once we were whole and well; at ease, at peace, at home in the world."
"Such patients, in neurological parlance, showed ‘negative’ disorders of behaviour, i.e. no behaviour at all."
"As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude."
"The hospital, in short, is a singular mixture, where freedom and bondage, warmth and coldness, human and mechanical, life and death, are locked together in perpetual combat."
"These were their expectations before the coming of L-DOPA."
"It is impossible to avoid the feeling that here, over and above all legitimate enthusiasms, there is this special enthusiasm, this mysticism, of a magical sort."
"It is at this point that he, ingenuously, and his apothecary and doctor, perhaps disingenuously, together depart from reality."
"We may now pass on to the ‘straight’ story of L-DOPA, remembering the mystical thread which always winds through it."
"Neurochemistry, as a science, scarcely existed in the 1920s."
"Immediate efforts were made to replenish the brain-dopamine in Parkinsonian patients."
"The impact of Cotzias’s work was immediate and astounding in the neurological world."
"The cost of L-DOPA in 1967 and 1968 was exceedingly high."
"Observers of Parkinsonism had been content to ‘spot’ various characteristics."
"Parkinson was not merely talented – he was a man of genius."
"Parkinsonism, like neurosis, is a conative disorder."
"We must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter."
"Thus, Parkinsonism itself is not ‘purely’ motor."
"Rigidity can be loosened to a remarkable degree if the patient is suspended in water."
"Analogous concepts are used by William James, in his discussion of ‘perversions’ of will."
"The term ‘sleeping-sickness’ is used in America to designate both the African, parasite-borne, endemic disease."
"Absolute inability to sleep (agrypnia), in such patients, even without other symptoms, proved fatal in ten to fourteen days."
"The enormous range of post-encephalitic symptoms fascinated physiologists as well as physicians."
"In Thom Gunn’s poem ‘The Sense of Movement,’ there occurs the following pivotal line: ‘One is always nearer by not being still.’"
"Smith Ely Jelliffe, a man equally eminent as neurologist and psychoanalyst."
"This was his summing-up, looking back on the epidemic: ‘In the monumental strides made by neuropsychiatry during the past ten years no single advance has approached in importance.’"
"One of the great surprises of nature is that the plant world contains so many substances which have a profound effect upon animals."
"I ceased to have any moods. I ceased to care about anything. Nothing moved me – not even the death of my parents. I forgot what it felt like to be happy or unhappy. Was it good or bad? It was neither. It was nothing."
"With continued improvement of her voice, Mrs B. became quite talkative, and showed an intelligence, a charm, and a humour, which had been almost totally concealed by her disease."
"I've lost my husband and son... I drove them away... My daughter's crazy... It's all my fault. It must be a punishment for something I did."
"Don't give me any of that slush! I want a steak, well done!"
"I feel full of pep, vigour, and vitality. Is it the medicine I am taking, or just my new state of mind?"
"It's a hell of a life," he would shout; "I wish I was dead."
"I'm crazy, I'm crazy, I'm crazy... if I don't get out of this fucking place, I'll go crazy, crazy, crazy!"
"I was going to kill myself, in '22... I'm glad I didn't... It's been a good game, encephalitis and all."
"I feel like a man again. I feel I’ve got some use and a place in the world … A man can’t live without that."
"My mind was like a still pool reflecting itself."
"I am so happy, so very very happy. I feel so good, so full of energy."
"It wasn’t the drug which upset me. It was your going away. I couldn’t be sure you would ever come back. I felt so afraid, I thought I would die."
"You surely wouldn’t forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!"
"She was eager and interested in everything and everyone – chock-full of life, and full of enjoyment."
"I’ve been shut up in places since the day I was born … I’ve been shut up in illness since the day I was born … That’s a hell of a life for someone to have … Why the hell couldn’t I have died as a kid?"
"Don’t you have eyes and ears in your head? Can’t you see I’m dying of grief? For Chrissake let me die in peace!"
"These dire warnings would alternate with hours of crooning, maudlin baby-talk: ‘Lucy, my baby, my little living doll … There’s nobody who loves you like me … Nobody in the world could love you like me … For you, little Lucy, I have given my life …’"
"I am so sick, so sick, so sick. Oh death, come quick, come quick, come quick!"
"I saw the sun. I realized I was neither dead nor in Hell. I felt life stirring inside me."
"First I thought they were ghosts...then I realized they were supernatural."
"I thought L-DOPA was the most wonderful thing in the world, then...the worst thing."
"I’ve gotten so used to depending on people...I’ve lost all confidence in myself."
"L-DOPA is power and irresistible force. L-DOPA is wanton, egotistical power."
"I’ve had enough visions and what-not to last me a lifetime."
"You are the music while the music lasts." - T. S. Eliot
"I can do nothing alone. I can do anything with – with music or people to help me."
"Music serves to arouse her own quickness, her living-and-moving identity and will, which is otherwise dormant."
"She was only moved by music which moved her."
"One had only to take her hand, or touch her in the lightest possible way, for her to ‘awaken’."
"This dark thought, which I endeavoured to banish, first came to me when I saw Hester in 1966."
"The knowledge of how-to-stand can immediately lead to other knowledge – of how-to-walk, how-to-dance, how-to-jump, whatever."
"The moment he has stood up, he forgets what he has done – the knowledge of how-to-stand only being present in the moment of standing."
"The sudden relief of Parkinsonism, catatonia, tensions, torsions, etc., is experienced as a deflation or detumescence, a sudden relief of an internal pressure; patients often compare it to passing flatus, eructation, or emptying of the bladder."
"Patients who comment on the ‘pressure’ or ‘force’ of their Parkinsonism, etc., are clearly not speaking in physical terms, but in ontological or metaphysical terms which correspond to their experience."
"This return-to-oneself, resipiscence, ‘rebirth,’ is an infinitely dramatic and moving event, especially in a patient with a rich and full self, who has been dispossessed by disease for years or decades."
"The automatic return of real being and health, pari passu with the drainage of disease, shows that disease is not a thing-in-itself, but parasitic on health and life and reality."
"Awakening consists of a change in awareness, of one’s total relation to one’s self and the world."
"The world becomes wonderfully vivid again. He finds grounds of interest and amazement and amusement all round him – as if he were a child again, or released from gaol."
"Reunited with the world and himself, the entire being and bearing of the patient now changes."
"The stream of being, no longer clogged or congealed, flows with an effortless, unforced ease."
"These feelings, variously coloured by individual disposition and taste, are experienced, with greater or less intensity, by every patient who becomes fully awakened from the use of L-DOPA."
"He feels so contented, like I’m at home at last after a long hard journey. Just as warm and peaceful as a cat by the fire."
"But sooner or later, in one way or another, almost every patient is plunged into problems and troubles."
"The term ‘side-effects’ is objectionable, and to my mind untenable, on three sets of grounds: practical, physiological, philosophical."
"The therapeutic corollary of all this is that we may commit ourselves (and our patients) to chimerical hopes and searches for ‘abolishing side-effects,’ while excluding from our attention the very real ways in which they can be modified, or be made more bearable."
"For what we see, in every patient maintained on L-DOPA, is that his tolerance for the drug becomes less and less, while his need for the drug becomes greater and greater."
"Our patients, then, ascend higher and higher into the height of exorbitance, becoming more active, excited, impatient, increasingly restless, choreic, akathisic, more driven by tics and urges and itches, continually more hectic, fervid, and ardent."
"The form and tempo of ‘crashing’ are immensely variable in Parkinsonian patients; and in many of the stabler, more fortunate patients, there is more the feeling of gentle subsidence and detumescence, than of a sudden violent crash."
"The deepest and most general forms of homeostasis proceed ‘automatically,’ below the level of conscious control."
"The essential thing is feeling at home in the world, knowing in the depths of one’s being that one has a real place in the home of the world."
"They have acquired a depth, a fullness, a richness, an awareness of themselves and of the nature of things, of a sort which is rare, and only to be achieved through experience and suffering."
"What we do see, first and last, is the utter inadequacy of mechanical medicine, the utter inadequacy of a mechanical worldview."
"The brain learns these ‘side effects,’ incorporates them as part of a new (and malignant) repertoire."
"Each wave of excitement kindles new responses, which are thereafter facilitated and become part of the excitement."
"Generically similar reactions have been described by Pavlov, in experimental animals submitted to ‘supra-maximal’ stress."
"Such recommendations, to my mind, can be dangerously misleading in the management of patients."
"These deeply pathological states seem to lead us towards exceedingly strange yet possible images of ‘inner space’."
"Many patients, similarly, speak of waves running through them, or of being tossed up and down like a boat in heavy seas."
"Consideration of these sparkling effervescent deliria, and of the kinematic vision and ‘standstills’ with which they may be associated."
"The anamnestic powers of L-DOPA seem to be among its most remarkable effects."
"The constitution of dramatic unities is radically different from that of logical unities."
"The tendency to exorbitance and the tendency to schism are clearly quite separate."
"Accommodation lacks the glamour of Awakening. It lacks its sudden, spontaneous, ‘miraculous’ quality."
"The special need for additional sleep, rest, or recuperation, in these frail, struggling, convalescing-accommodating patients must be interpreted in metaphysical as well as physical terms."
"The notion of a drug which will banish sadness and fatigue, increase energy, expand consciousness, imbue or reimbue the world with wonder, has always excited desire and imagination."
"We may use alternative terms, and say that the problem of activation is one of order or organisation, of finding forms of order or organisation which will combat the specific disorders and disorganisations which constitute Parkinsonism."
"Such a subtle, ever-changing play of forces may also be achieved through the use of certain ‘natural’ devices, which intermediate, so to speak, between afflicted patients and the forces of Nature."
"The Parkinsonian – unlike the cortical apraxic-agnosic – understands perfectly well what is meant by a ‘foot’; he has in no sense lost his ideas of dimension."
"The essence of this passivity lies in peculiar difficulties of self-stimulation, and initiation, not in the capacity to respond to stimulation."
"The true ideal would be the restoration of a ‘natural’ rhythm and movement, the ‘kinetic melody’ natural and normal to each particular patient."