Summary

“In Perfect Health I Begin”, pages 39 – 67. The author begins this next section with descriptions of how he completed first an undergraduate, and then a graduate, degree in literature, writing a thesis for the latter on the work of poet Walt Whitman who, Kalathini says, also struggled with the body / brain / mind relationship. That thesis, the author adds, included a great many neurological ideas and concepts of a sort that set it quite distantly apart from other, more literary theses. He describes realizing, in the aftermath of his graduate school experience, that only the practice of medicine would give him the opportunity to study and examine the connection between the brain and the mind: in the aftermath of his literary studies, he says, “words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them.” With that attitude in mind, he says, he went...