Here’s one of the best new pieces to run in The New Yorker in months. It’s on itching, and just in time for summer!
Tease:
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. 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.
Surgeon-cum-writer Atul Gawande navigates through neurology so easily, he’s poised to join Malcolm Gladwell’s ranks. I’ve never spent a train ride so self-conscious of my scratches.
-Erich.
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