The Sleeping Beauties - Suzanne O'Sullivan

Non-Fiction

Rating: 7.5/10

What happens when a cluster of children go to bed and then don’t wake up? Or a group of young girls manifest the ticks of terrets syndrome?  Or what about the indigenous tribe whose traditions have been subsumed over decades and outsiders assign the frenzied behavior of young people to demonic possession?  This book demonstrates that to understand such illnesses, we must understand the narrative around them, and shred the prejudices we have of psychosomatic disorders.

If our bodies have four secrets, only three will ever be revealed. There is not always a tidy medical explanation to be found and doctors tend to look at what’s present in the room with them and the patient, not seeking to gain invaluable context by extending their view. This is likely born of the societal position that an illness with a diagnosis is impressive, the opposite being true of those without. Further we require that an individual look ill to garner our sympathy and our belief that medicine is infallible is often unshakable.

Our bodies speak for us, often unbidden.  Our posture, our facial expressions, our movements.  We embody the world we move through and frequently, incorrectly, attribute the onset of a symptom to an illness.  If we do as this book suggests and look closer and more carefully, what we find will surely ease us.

“To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s own place within it and to reassemble it as seen from his.” John Berger

Book Pairing(s): The Body by Bill Bryson, Gut: The Inside Story by Guilia Enders, Emperor Of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee