Pria Anand sees a “vast liminal space” between wellness and illness
David Degner
The Mind Electric
Pria Anand (Virago (UK); Washington Square Press (US))
From House to Grey’s Anatomy, there is good reason why the medical profession has inspired so many popular series. A patient’s journey through the hospital system can mirror the time-honoured structures of narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end, rising and falling action and often plenty of tension.
As much as we might think of medicine as a hard science – blood, bones and pharmaceuticals – it is also about storytelling, writes neurologist Pria Anand in her lyrical and frequently spellbinding first book, The Mind Electric: Stories of the strangeness and wonder of our brains.
When Anand was in medical school in California, she worried her predilection for narrative would disadvantage her. In fact, she discovered, “the ways people choose to tell their story” can be as revealing as any test results.
Anand is upfront about her debt, in her writing and her medical practice, to the late author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who drew from his personal experience to diagnose his patients as well as empathise with their cases. The Mind Electric – she respectfully suggests – is in the vein of Sacks’s best-known work, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
No one could hope to match Sacks’s originality and brilliance, but Anand shares his humanity, curiosity and wide-ranging intellect. Her prose is as elegant and controlled when tackling the intricate, often perverse workings of the brain as it is when telling the stories of particular patients.
But The Mind Electric is more than a collection of “clinical tales”. Anand’s through line is the central importance of storytelling to the practice of medicine. The human desire for narrative, she notes, is ancient, universal and so hardwired that “it often survives and even surges after the most devastating of brain injuries”.
How a patient describes their state of health, whether good or bad, may not be supported by a doctor’s assessment or their vital signs. Anand describes a patient, a retired paediatrician, who was rendered comatose after a brain haemorrhage. She seemed to make a full recovery, except for the fact she was getting out of her hospital bed each morning to do her morning rounds on her fellow patients, mistaking Anand and other doctors for her colleagues.
No one could match Sacks’s brilliance, but Anand shares the writer’s humanity and wide-ranging intellect
Anand is perspicacious on the ways our brains can mislead us, and how they exist as both a frustration and feature of medical care. But it isn’t just the patients’ delusions that must be taken into account; the doctor is equally relevant, and can even be fallible.
Anand shows how shifts in her own health have affected her approach to her work – from the sleep loss of medical training to the “phantom noise” she started to hear but neglected to investigate. (It was later revealed to be caused by a malformation in the veins connecting her brain to her heart.)
The “power imbalance inherent in medical practice”, Anand argues, exists not just in the arrogance of doctor-knows-best, but in the false binaries it upholds – between science and story, objective truths and subjective accounts. Through history, many confidently delivered diagnoses were rooted in “scientific” understanding that was simply wrong – consider the idea of the “wandering womb”.
Though Anand and early reviewers’ references to Sacks aren’t misplaced, The Mind Electric made me think more of A Body Made of Glass, Caroline Crampton’s history and personal account of hypochondria. Where Crampton wrote from a patient’s perspective, Anand describes as a doctor that same “vast liminal expanse that stretches between wellness and illness”.
The two books suggest an emerging mainstream openness to medical mysteries, not just dramas, and perhaps dawning recognition that the dichotomies we have long accepted without question – between “healthy brains and failing ones”, say, and even sickness and health – may not always be clear-cut.
In The Mind Electric, Anand demonstrates the empathy, humility and profound interest in humanity that demarcates an exceptional doctor – and which, in a perfect world, would be consistent across the profession.
Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, UK
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