Bad Dreams
To defeat an enemy you must understand it, Sun Tzu said in his Art of War. Tens of thousands of the world’s scientists are trying to understand Covid-19, so they can find better ways to treat those suffering the virus and develop vaccines to thwart its spread. Media coverage of these researchers tends to show white-coated men and women gazing into microscopes or petri dishes in laboratories. But some medical scholars occupy very different habitats. They work in library archives, reading old newspapers and manuscripts, or interview the elderly. They are medical historians, who trace the courses of old epidemics, searching for patterns and causes, in the hope of gaining insights into diseases that afflict us today.
Oliver Sacks’ was published in 1973. It is a masterpiece of medical history as well as an affecting memoir. I’ve been rereading the book during lockdown,
