New Yorker: "Medical Mysteries" (Including "The Woman Who Scratched Through Her Skull")

A selection of stories from The New Yorker’s archive

Medical Mysteries

Literary scholars have a theory about detective stories: they say that they express our fears about modern life. Living in a big city, far from your family, you don’t know whom to trust; as a result, you come to regard everybody with a healthy dose of skepticism. If that’s true, then what do medical mysteries—stories of unaccountable illnesses and clever cures—say about us? This week, we bring you seven such stories. In Atul Gawande’s “The Itch,” a woman starts scratching and can’t stop; her horrifying plight has the side effect of revealing something about the way our brains work. Similarly, Richard Preston’s “An Error in the Code” explores a rare disorder that causes people to harm themselves; it offers a window into the laws that govern normal human behavior. Stories like these—and Oliver Sacks’s “The Case of Anna H.,” about a woman who loses the ability to recognize objects—seem to evoke the combined wonder and fear we feel in response to new discoveries about the frailties of the human body. Other pieces, such as Cynthia Zarin’s “An Enlarged Heart” and Laura Hillenbrand’s “A Sudden Illness,” speak to the fact that, in an age of technological predictability, our health is one part of life over which we have relatively little control. Finally, Berton Roueché’s “Sandy” (concerning a case of mass hysteria at a Florida elementary school) and Margaret Talbot’s “The Bad Mother” (about parents who fake their children’s illnesses) are about how, sometimes, people are so unknowable that even the scientific community finds itself flummoxed. Considered together, the pieces below suggest that often it’s not other people we need to watch out for—it’s ourselves. —Erin Overbey and Joshua Rothman, archivists

A Neurologist’s Notebook|October 7, 2002 The Case of Anna H. In January of 1999, I received the following letter, from a woman I will call Anna H.: “Dear Dr. Sacks, My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is: I can’t read. I can’t read music, or anything else.” BY OLIVER SACKS

Personal History|July 7, 2003 A Sudden Illness Everything I ate made my abdomen balloon. I radiated heat, and my joints and muscles felt bruised. Every day on the way to classes, I struggled a little harder to make it up the hill behind my apartment. Eventually, I began stopping halfway to rest against the trunk of a tree. BY LAURA HILLENBRAND

Annals of Medicine|August 21, 1978 Sandy “She was wrong in thinking that all those aches and pains and chills and nausea were illusory. They were real, all right. And this was a real epidemic. It was an epidemic of mass hysteria,” Dr. Nitzkin said. BY BERTON ROUECHÉ

Personal History|August 18, 2003 An Enlarged Heart It began with a cough. Her brother had a cough. And, after all, what was a cough? They had all had them. In winter, they passed them around like sweets. BY CYNTHIA ZARIN

Annals of Medicine|August 13, 2007 An Error in the Code Decades after the discovery of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, it is still mysterious. It is perhaps the clearest example of a simple change in the human DNA which leads to a striking, comprehensive change in behavior. BY RICHARD PRESTON

Annals of Medicine|June 30, 2008 The Itch Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain. BY ATUL GAWANDE