To the Editor:
Joseph Epstein seems to have no conception of what neurologists today actually do [“Writing on the Brain,” April]. He mentions, for instance, electroshock as a therapy for bipolar disorder, but such treatment is beyond the ken of any neurologist I have met during more than 30 years of practice in the specialty.
Mr. Epstein makes a particularly disturbing and insulting attack when he asserts that neurologists can make diagnoses but “only occasionally make things right.” This is blatantly false. Common neurological diseases like migraine, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s are treatable, and most patients with formerly dreaded diseases like Guillain-Barré syndrome, myasthenia gravis, and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy now lead normal, productive lives and enjoy normal life spans.
Although Mr. Epstein criticizes Alice Flaherty’s use of qualifying words like “may,” “seem,” “could,” and “appears” in her recent book, The Midnight Disease, those words are appropriate when the subject is biology or medicine. In these disciplines, to be certain is to be foolish. A creative writer, on the other hand, has the license to be certain since his contentions can never be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method. As Voltaire put it, “doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”
Jack N. Alpert, M.D.
Houston, Texas
To the Editor:
It grieves me that the usually brilliant Joseph Epstein reinforces the self-deprecating and clichéd notion that in order to be a writer “one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work.” True, a few writers have been helpless boobs. But many more have lived successful, if not necessarily satisfying, lives: Wallace Stevens was an insurance-company manager, T.S. Eliot a banker, Kafka a claims accountant. Mencken and Hemingway were journalists, Borges was a librarian, Thoreau a surveyor, Twain a riverboat pilot and printer, Emerson a preacher. If nothing else, writers are usually competent to teach English or edit a journal. Mr. Epstein himself was a top-notch editor and teacher. He should give himself some credit.
Christopher Orlet
Columbia, Illinois
To the Editor:
Suffering as I do from that incurable disease characterized by incompetence, contempt, and lunacy, I am compelled to say how much I enjoyed Joseph Epstein’s piece. But he leaves out the ultimate symptom of being a writer: envy of one’s peers. His article is a perfect example of how to arouse it.
Joe Harkins
Jersey City, New Jersey
To the Editor:
A thousand bravos to Joseph Epstein for his essay, “Writing on the Brain.” When I tell people that I write because I love to see my name in print, they look at me as if I were a monster. Maybe so, but I am an honest monster, and it sounds as if I am in very good company.
Laura Kennelly
Berea, Ohio
Joseph Epstein writes:
Dr. Jack N. Alpert, writing in defense of his own medical specialty, reminds me of nothing so much as the Jesuit who, accused of killing seven men and a dog, produces the dog.
In my article I cited a friend who was told that, as a cure for bipolar illness, shock therapy was as iffy a proposition as restarting one’s computer to cure one’s software problems—sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. My friend now informs me that it was not a neurologist who administered his ECT but a psychiatrist. I regret having gotten this wrong. But surely the larger point is this: since we know so little about the mind, medical science often has to fall back on just such crude analogies when confronting serious mental problems.
If Dr. Alpert will reread my essay, he will discover that I know perfectly well that neurology can be an aid in lessening the torments of muscular sclerosis and other grave illnesses. “Neurology,” I wrote, “is at its best when it describes how the body works in connection with the nervous system, as in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.” But, knowledge of the brain being as rudimentary as it is, neurology’s role is usually greater in alleviation than in actual cure. No small thing, the alleviation of pain and suffering; but cure awaits greater knowledge, which, as of now, we do not have.
In any case, as Dr. Alpert must be aware, my real quarrel is not with the uses of neurology to lessen suffering but with its pretensions to understanding human consciousness and artistic creation—the subject of Alice Flaherty’s book. In my article I claimed those powers of understanding were just about nil. Nothing in Dr. Alpert’s letter convinces me otherwise.
Dr. Alpert does not say whether he has actually read Flaherty’s book. In commenting on her continual use of qualifiers when introducing scientific material, I said that she did so because she was “an honest person.” I would not have had her do otherwise. But I would add that if she were asked to remove every sentence containing such qualifiers, there would remain enough material of purely scientific interest to compose, with a bit of padding, a sonnet.
I wonder if Christopher Orlet knows the old Russian proverb to the effect that a poet always cheats his boss. I take the point of this proverb to be that a true writer, under the lash of necessity, can struggle along at a job to make a living, but his heart and his mind will always be elsewhere. My advice to Mr. Orlet, or to anyone else whose dentist tells him that he is writing a novel, is to get the hell out of that dental chair as quickly as possible.
Finally, I thank Joe Harkins and Laura Kennelly for their kind words.
