BOOK REVIEW : The Man Who Tasted Words Author : Dr Guy Leschziner St . Martin ' s Press ( February 22 , 2022 )
reviewed by VASUDEVA IYER , MD
One of the joys of Christmas holidays is opening the gifts and being surprised by something unique . I was overjoyed to receive greetings and a gift from an old student of mine ( I have wondered how long a student will remember his / her teacher ), of whom I am very proud . He has achieved the pinnacle of success , becoming the Chairman of Neurology in a prestigious medical school .
The gift was a book that bore a very strange title , The Man Who Tasted Words . It was written by Dr . Guy Leschziner , a professor of neurology and sleep medicine in London , and published in 2022 by St . Martin ’ s Publishing Group , New York . The moment I started reading , I was so captivated that I just could not put it down . I finished reading it in about three hours without experiencing any somnolence ( falling asleep with a book in my hand has become a problem of late ). Dr . Leschziner has a wonderful style of writing with several stories pertaining to patients with unique forms of sensory loss . He makes complex medical cases simple enough for a lay person to understand but also provides sufficient clinical detail to keep the medical students and the physician interested .
The first chapter is The Stuff of Superheroes and deals with many aspects of the sensation of pain . He describes the case of Paul who starts his story with an anecdote . “ When one of my teeth fell out as a child , my dad made the mistake of telling me that , if I put it under my pillow , the tooth fairy would give me a pound . I immediately thought to myself , ‘ Oh , great ! Well , I ’ ve got many teeth in my head . That ’ s many pounds !’ My dad caught me with a pair of pliers , trying to pull my teeth out .” Paul had no sense of pain , which led to many injuries (“ I don ’ t think there is a bone I haven ’ t actually broken ”). Dr . Leschziner explains in lay terms the physiology of pain and the fundamental role of sodium channels for pain perception and how a specific defect in the gene SCN9A caused defective sodium channel Nav1.7 leading to Paul ’ s total loss of pain .
Chapter 2 is captioned Zombie Faces and narrates the story of Nina who became visually impaired as a child due to bilateral corneal opacification . She had undergone corneal transplant several times ,
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