When I was young my mother, who was a surgeon, used to take me to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum. That was Hunter's original 18th century museum. It still had a skeleton of the Irish giant, the Sicilian dwarf and the skulls of Turgenev and Anatole France next to each other. And my father would tell me, when he had been a young man at the London hospital the Elephant Man was still a memory for many people. So if you want, looking for prodigiousness is in me but always to illustrate the extent of humanity, of human capacity and diversity.

I was very moved some years ago in a Mennonite village in northern Canada where a fifth of the population has Tourette's. I was wondering how this deeply religious community would deal with it. Basically, their attitude was similar to that expressed in an old Jewish blessing to be said on seeing a strange person: you praise God for the diversity of Creation.

I suggest half-facetiously that the book should be read under spinal anesthesia so the reader will know in himself what I'm talking about. These things are really quite unimaginable. When you have it, you cannot imagine it otherwise, and when it's not there you can't imagine it. The absolute unimaginability of all sorts of terrible neural knowledge which comes and goes is what I'm talking about.

A very Parkinsonian patient of mine managed, before he froze up, to inject himself with medication. A minute later he straightened and said, "I have forgotten how to be Parkinsonian." Then he added, "In forty or fifty minutes, when it wears off, the terrible knowledge of how to be Parkinsonian will come back."

William Mitchell, the first to describe phantom limbs, originally used a fictional form. But the negative phantom -- the absence, the alienation -- has never made its way very well into the medical literature.

I don't know who my models are. Like many people of my generation, I adored the H. G. Wells' short stories and was also very fond of Chesterton. I footnote Wells' Country of the Blind,Jthough strangely that footnote has only become relevant in an experience I've had subsequently, when, last summer, I went to an island of the colorblind and saw a whole community who for two centuries have had no perception and no conception of color. They've organized their lives in completely different terms and regard us so-called color normals as distracted by chromatic hallucinations.

My tastes are rather conventional. I was brought up with Dickens and Trollope. My mother used to read D.H. Lawrence stories to me when I was young. I just came across a marvelous poem of D.H. Lawrence in which he speaks of how red is essentially sensuous and how "even God can't think of red."

Writers who may have been a model for me -- I still love reading them -- are the naturalists. I love Humboldt's personal narratives, Darwin on the Beagle, Wallace in Malaya, the notion of the scientific adventure. For that matter, I'm fond of Conan Doyle, not only Sherlock Holmes but the Challenger books, especially The Lost World. I used to know it by heart.

I don't believe in prognostication in any deep sense, although I think that work may be done in dreams which may alter reality. I give an example of that in A Leg to Stand On when I was asked to put down a crutch and walk. I tried and fell over. Then I had a dream in which I threw the crutch away. I woke up and immediately did so; it had been rehearsed in the dream. Why or how Magda, in Awakenings, dreamed she was going to die the day she did, I don't know.

I go along with Freud about the occult; I'm very fond of mystery; I hate the occult.

And I think of that last novella of Thomas Mann, The Black Swan, where a post-menopausal woman at a spa feeling fortyish and sad meets a young man who's very attentive. She falls in love and starts to feel marvelous. Then, strangely, she bleeds again. Perhaps her periods are coming back, her youth returning. Everyone compliments her. Then she starts to feel ill and gets a bad color and has a huge hemorrhage. In the last scene, she is on the operating table. The surgeons are talking. She has a secreting tumor in her ovary, which has metastasized everywhere. One of them says, something like this would produce a great surge of estrogen, of hormones, and might produce an aphrodisiac state. Another says, perhaps it's the other way around; perhaps falling in love can cause the ovarian tumor.

Certainly with something like Tourette's, whatever the suffering and disability, there may also be energy and spontaneity. I was just in Toronto seeing a friend of mine, a very Tourettic artist. Sometimes the Tourette's can tear him apart; it can be full of a pantomimic impulse. Other times it can all rush together in the form of creativity. He doesn't want medication because he fears it will take the edge off, although when I see how terrifying it is I fear for him.

People have called me on romanticizing illness and there may be some truth to it; I'm prepared to retract that somewhat. But what interests me, especially now, is that new health is to be achieved through reorganizing. So that in the case of the colorblind artist, he first of all finds himself in an impoverished, ugly, abnormal world drained of meaning and feeling because color had been such a vehicle for him. At that point he is suicidal; he feels it's the end of him and his art. Then, the change occurs. What had been hideous and ugly and impoverished becomes fascinating, privileged and beautiful.