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The War of Eye and Ear [The Lancet, 2002, as a filler; and PN Review 2008, as an expanded essay, ‘On the Senses as Perceptual Systems’] It should be said that Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, doubted that our eyes emitted anything at all, surmising that they passively receive the radiation of visible objects: this is the intromission theory of vision. It took Emmanuel Kant to revive extramission, but in the form of projected mental images of the empirical world. It was only when I finished this article that I realised I had written a variant on the classic Athens versus Jerusalem essay on the origins of European civilisation. In the story of the burning bush, Moses shields his eyes so as not to catch sight of God’s face: in refusing sight, he begins to hear the voice. And this notion of figural emptiness as a recipient for divine instruction never leaves Western civilisation: Hegel’s philosophy is essentially an instruction for us to become, ontologically, enemies or at least aliens to ourselves. The obsession with sight and sightedness is by no means limited to the sciences. The avant-garde artist and Bauhaus theorist László Moholy-Nagy talked about ‘the hygiene of the optical’, and suggested that creative use of the camera would, by cleansing vision and educating the subconscious, make amends for the depredations of capitalism. By contrast, Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology gave primacy to the ear over the eye; he also attributed expressivity to the face, which could ‘speak’ before the mouth opened. In a late poem, Paul Celan expresses most concisely the attention to the other person that I was trying to advocate. ‘…hör dich ein / mit dem Mund.’ (Listen in / with your mouth.) If anything, these days, it’s not just that doctors don’t have the time to listen properly to their patients; they don’t touch them much either. Machines do the diagnostic work so much more expeditiously. Under the Magic Mountain [Lapham’s Quarterly, 2009, as ‘Course of Illness: A Reappraisal of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain’] In her book of recollections Meine ungeschriebenen Memoiren (1974) Thomas Mann’s wife Katia raised the possibility that the ill-defined health problem that had afflicted her after the birth of her fourth 282  A Doctor’s Dictionary
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child (she had six children altogether) and led her Munich doctors to send her for months at a time to various fashionable retreats in the Swiss valleys—which included Dr Friedrich Jessen’s Waldsanatorium in Davos—might ‘have cleared up of itself’. Or perhaps she had never had ‘incipient’ TB in the first place? Four years before she published her memoir, a lung specialist, Professor Christian Virchow, had looked at the well-preserved X-ray films from 1912 and told her that for all his ‘intensive study there was no finding to suggest incipient tuberculosis’. In their biography Frau Thomas Mann (2003) Inge and Walter Jens reveal that Katia Mann wouldn’t countenance any talk of a diagnostic error—‘implying of course that The Magic Mountain novel would in significant parts have been based on a medical mistake’. Whether a mistake or not, it doesn’t in the least detract from the novel, which at one level explores all the possibilities of human wilfulness and perversity, and not always those generated by ‘illnesses’. German doctors don’t contradict their rich patients who have private insurance today, quite the reverse; and there is no reason to imagine they did in the 1910s either. A sarcastic letter-writer once termed this ‘opulence-based’ medicine. Katia Mann died in 1980, aged ninety-seven. The Life and Times of Ernst Weiss [Times Literary Supplement, 2010, essay-review of Ernst Weiss’ novel Georg Letham:Arzt und Mörder, translated by Joel Rotenberg] I have written about Ernst Weiss elsewhere, and the rather sensationalist account of Hitler’s ‘conversion experience’ under hypnosis in 1918 as described in his novel The Eyewitness (1963). It has to be said that for want of reliable documentary testimony this episode receives only glancing mention in the major biographies, although Hitler seems to refer to it himself in Mein Kampf. Whatever happened in Dr Forster’s Brandenburg clinic, the Führer’s behaviour was more obviously influenced by another physician entirely: his ‘Leibarzt’ or personal physician, the shadowy Theodor Gilbert Morell, whom most of the Nazi leadership dismissed (with good reason) as a quack. In addition to cocaine eyedrops, the ‘tonic’ injections of the ‘Reichsspritzenminister’ are known to have included methamphetamine, strychnine and other dubious substances. Endnotes  283

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The War of Eye and Ear [The Lancet, 2002, as a filler; and PN Review 2008, as an expanded essay, ‘On the Senses as Perceptual Systems’]

It should be said that Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, doubted that our eyes emitted anything at all, surmising that they passively receive the radiation of visible objects: this is the intromission theory of vision. It took Emmanuel Kant to revive extramission, but in the form of projected mental images of the empirical world. It was only when I finished this article that I realised I had written a variant on the classic Athens versus Jerusalem essay on the origins of European civilisation. In the story of the burning bush, Moses shields his eyes so as not to catch sight of God’s face: in refusing sight, he begins to hear the voice. And this notion of figural emptiness as a recipient for divine instruction never leaves Western civilisation: Hegel’s philosophy is essentially an instruction for us to become, ontologically, enemies or at least aliens to ourselves. The obsession with sight and sightedness is by no means limited to the sciences. The avant-garde artist and Bauhaus theorist László Moholy-Nagy talked about ‘the hygiene of the optical’, and suggested that creative use of the camera would, by cleansing vision and educating the subconscious, make amends for the depredations of capitalism. By contrast, Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology gave primacy to the ear over the eye; he also attributed expressivity to the face, which could ‘speak’ before the mouth opened. In a late poem, Paul Celan expresses most concisely the attention to the other person that I was trying to advocate. ‘…hör dich ein / mit dem Mund.’ (Listen in / with your mouth.) If anything, these days, it’s not just that doctors don’t have the time to listen properly to their patients; they don’t touch them much either. Machines do the diagnostic work so much more expeditiously.

Under the Magic Mountain [Lapham’s Quarterly, 2009, as ‘Course of Illness: A Reappraisal of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain’] In her book of recollections Meine ungeschriebenen Memoiren (1974) Thomas Mann’s wife Katia raised the possibility that the ill-defined health problem that had afflicted her after the birth of her fourth

282  A Doctor’s Dictionary

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