Summary:

Thirteen-year-old Charles has been sick with a fever for days. The family doctor makes house calls and diagnoses the problem as scarlet fever and a cold. The boy is unconvinced and questions the physician's certainty since no diagnostic tests have been done. Charles is terrified when first his hands and then his legs change. He senses that his extremities become swollen, warm, throbbing, and twitching. Although the limbs appear normal, Charles is sure that he no longer has control of them. Recalling how the wood of petrified trees transforms into stone, he now fears that his entire body has been irrevocably replaced by a propagating mass of microbes.

The doctor dismisses the boy's fright as the result of fever and imagination. He placates Charles by giving him pills. When Charles begins choking himself, his parents restrain him in bed. Fortunately, the teenager improves dramatically. His fever disappears, and he is suddenly robust. Yet there is something odd (and a bit creepy) about Charles following his recovery.

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While riding his bicycle, Paul Rayment, a 60-year-old Australian photographer, is struck by a car. He winds up in the hospital, has a leg amputated, and returns to his quarters to contemplate his future and deal with a series of nurses sent by the hospital social worker. Paul is divorced and has no living family.

His future looks bleak, and none of the nurses is satisfactory until the appearance of Marijana, a middle-aged Croatian woman with a young daughter, a teenage son, and a husband. The narrator gradually falls in love with Marijana, but by degrees his lust sublimates into an intense devotion to helping her son Drago survive his motorcycle phase and achieve his educational and professional objectives.

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Through his own studies and brilliance, a peasant servant of two students becomes an educated man. Persuaded by an army recruiter of the soldier's good life, he travels Europe before returning to his studies and becoming a licensed graduate of the law. An enamored woman inadvertently poisons him with a presumed love potion, leaving him crazy, believing he is made of glass. The Glass Graduate gains fame and fortune for his wit and wisdom, despite (because of) his folly. Cured by a cleric, his former large following rejects the now sane professional. He returns to the good life of soldiering.

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Healy focuses on the social and cultural meaning of disease in Britain during the early modern period (roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Her chapter on "The Humoral-Paracelsan Body" discusses how the humoral theory of Galen, at this time still dominant in constructing a notion of the human body and its functions, was challenged by a new Paracelsan medicine, with its emphasis on spirit and on experiment instead of book-learning, and by the emergence of syphilis. She also establishes the genre of the "regimen[t]," a text advising how to achieve personal and social order.

Her two chapters on "The Plaguy Body" review the late-medieval and Renaissance history of the plague and argue that the social meaning of the plague as a trope of violence and rebellion shifts over the course of the sixteenth century, from a judgment on Britain's "rich extortioners," careless of the welfare of the poor, to the threat represented by London's unruly urban underclass.

Healy's two chapters on "The Pocky Body" argue that the new disease of syphilis became another dominant metaphor for social disorder because it helped focus anxieties about cultural hypocrisy, corruption, and degeneration, linked to the problems of sin generally and excessive appetite in particular. Her final chapter examines "The Glutted, Unvented Body," another powerful figure of excessive appetite, threatening that the body (and its appetites) would dethrone the head (the site of reason).

Healy demonstrates the importance of debates over the glutted, headless body as a way for British writers to negotiate the problems of a trade imbalance and the tricky terrain of resistance against the intemperate Stuart monarchs, culminating in the execution of Charles I in 1649. In the book as a whole, Healy reads literary and historical texts by authors as diverse as William Bullein, Thomas Dekker, Lucretius, Erasmus, William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure and Pericles), and Milton (Comus).

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A woman who has had extensive bowel surgery and a colostomy now must deal with her changed appearance. She feels unattractive, and the strong odors and liquid stool that come from her colostomy are repulsive to her and to her husband. She is angry about her loss of identity, and takes the anger out on her husband. He feels guilty about her illness and surgery, and tries to overcompensate by trying extra hard to please his wife. He finally begins reading "Moby Dick" to his wife as a way to say that he will stay with her through the long haul.

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An artist, suffering from psoriasis, believes he is "loathsome to love" because of his scaly skin. "The name of the disease, spiritually speaking, is Humiliation." The narrator creates gorgeous pottery--flawless, smooth--the opposite of his rough, splotchy skin. His retailer, Himmelfahrer (he who travels through Heaven), calls him a genius. His girlfriend, Carlotta, loves him the way he is.

However, as the narrator goes through drug and light treatments under the care of a dermatologist, his skin begins to clear, but his pottery gets ugly and rough, Himmelfahrer expresses distress at the loss of quality, and the love relation with Carlotta cools. The artist declares himself beautiful, his girlfriend leaves, and Himmelfahrer won't buy any of his "gargoylish" pottery.

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J.J.’s parents are both deaf, so he grew up with Auslan (Australian sign language) as his native "tongue," although he is not deaf and speaks English perfectly. After a disastrous marriage, J.J. returns to live with his parents and to teach sign language at the Deaf Institute. Two students in his beginners’ class befriend him. They are Clive, an elderly man world renowned as a leader of the animal rights movement, and his much younger wife Stella, who is a poet. They soon present J.J. with a mysterious proposition: would he be willing to provide private lessons for their "step-daughter" at their home? We soon learn that their "step-daughter," Wish, is actually a young female gorilla, which they "rescued" from a research laboratory.

At first J.J. is reluctant because he is aware that the purported mastery of signing by non-human primates is not only controversial, but very limited, even if true. However, he discovers that Wish has remarkable cognitive abilities. She learns Auslan quickly and even begins to converse using metaphor and expressing complex topics.

Eventually her story is revealed. She had undergone fetal surgery to remove her adrenal glands, which evidently limit cortical growth in gorillas. Unconstrained by her adrenals (although receiving daily cortisone injections), Wish has developed intelligence far beyond that of other gorillas.

Nonetheless, she is still a sexually mature female gorilla. She falls in "love" with J.J. who, after initially rebuffing her, mates with her. J.J., by the way is quite obese, and so he is much more attractive to Wish than the other human males she encounters, who are all so un-gorilla-like. J.J. and Wish live in connubial bliss for a brief period, until Clive decides to prosecute J.J. for sexually abusing his gorilla, since presumably gorillas cannot give informed consent to sexual activity with humans. (Of course, Wish can and does, because of her super brain, but this concept is a bit too subtle for the frenzied media and the legal system.) After J.J. is arrested and she is removed to a local zoo, Wish becomes depressed and commits suicide. Clive drops the charges, after which the story lumbers to a generally unhappy ending.

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When Ben Nowak reached the age of fifty, his primary care physician for the past fifteen years, Dr. Ellen Parrish, began performing annual digital rectal examinations on him. Ben is still embarrassed by the female physician checking his prostate gland. He finds the younger Dr. Parrish attractive and available. She divorced her husband because the man was abusive.

Dr. Parrish's office receptionist happens to be the wife of Ben's friend, Jerry, who works at a landfill and brings home cases of expired beer. Once, Jerry found a dead newborn baby in the landfill. Dr. Parrish informs Ben that his prostate has gotten larger. The tests she orders come back "inconclusive" so additional tests are done. Ben concedes that he might have prostate cancer, but rationalizes that things could be "a hundred times worse" (29).

When his second set of test results are normal, Ben grasps that it is likely a temporary reprieve; he is only fine "until the next time" (34). He drives to the site of an illegal dump. The trunk of his car contains ten cases of expired beer (courtesy of Jerry). At the dump, he proceeds to drink one bottle of beer from each case and smashes the other twenty-three.

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This is a collection of two dozen case studies, written for non-medical readers, of patients with right-brain disorders. The chapters are divided into four groups: "Losses," dealing with loss of memory, cognition, and proprioceptive sense; "Excesses," with tics and other cases of overabundance; "Transports," with seizures and various "dreamy states," and "The World of the Simple," concerning mental retardation. In every case, Sacks focuses on the interior or existential world of the patient as the foundation of diagnosis and treatment. Sacks argues that this approach is appropriate for the right hemisphere, which compared to the left is less dedicated to specific skills and more dedicated to a "neurology of identity."

Sacks openly proposes these studies as a corrective to the field of neurology, which has tended to focus on the left hemisphere and therefore, he argues, has wound up treating patients solely in terms of specific deficits, often to their detriment. In "the higher reaches of neurology," and in psychology, Sacks argues, disease and identity must be studied together, and thus he recommends that neurologists "restore the human subject at the centre" of the case study. Sacks warmly recommends music, story-telling, and prayer as therapies that work by ignoring physiological defects and speaking to the patient's spirit or soul.

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Simon Dykes is a successful artist about to open another big show of his work in London. A week before the opening, he goes out to a bar with his colleagues, indulges in drugs, has sex with his girlfriend, and falls into an uncomfortable sleep with bizarre dreams. He wakes up in a world where every person is a chimpanzee and where humans are kept in zoos or are experimented on in labs, and the few humans surviving in the wild are close to extinction.

Terrified and dismayed, he is taken to a psychiatric ward where the chimpanzee doctors try to help him overcome his "delusions" that he is actually a human. They eventually turn to Dr. Zack Busner, an alpha male, theoretical renegade and media star, as well as a maverick drug researcher, "anti-psychiatrist," psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. Together they try to understand the root of Simon's delusion and return Simon to his sanity and "chimpunity."

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