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To consider healing dramas in the context of rehabilitation and how they might differ from other “noneventful” moments of recovery, we return briefly to Sacks and his leg injury, asking how he rediscovers and reclaims a leg that seemed for so long to be not merely injured, but vanished altogether. When and why are they nurtured by healers? What is it about the nature of rehabilitation practices and clinic culture that makes these dramas so fragile, so easily relinquished or neglected? Why do they crop up in the informal storytelling of some professionals but not in the more “official” discourses, such as the medical chart?īefore considering this mystery, it is worth identifying the qualities associated with the “eventful moment” of recovery. This article investigates the rise and fall of healing dramas. Even when such fostering occurs, the treating practitioner who in one moment helps to create a powerful healing drama may in the next moment deny that she has done so, or doubt her own wisdom in pursuing such a path. However, support is often short lived, undermined or aborted altogether. Sometimes, in other words, healers in Western biomedical settings do seem to recognize that recovery is constituted through “events,” and “rebirths” and this recognition translates into conscious efforts to support and foster such recovery dramas. Among occupational therapists (those health professionals we know best), there is even a discourse in the form of archetypal “best case” stories that stresses the centrality of such dramas to good practice. But-and here is the mystery that lies at the core of this article-we have also found sustained efforts to cultivate healing dramas which speak to such a person. We have found the systematic suppression of certain kinds of dramas in clinical settings, especially dramas in which a central character is the patient as a complex, socially situated person with his or her own illness experience and biography. We will argue that the puzzle Sacks notes becomes ever more complex as one attends to the daily practices, discourses, and ideologies of these professionals.
In this article, we take up Sacks’s puzzle, drawing from our own ethnographic research among occupational therapists, physical therapists, physicians, nurses, and other pediatric health professionals who treat children who are seriously ill or disabled.
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How can they speak of his recovery as “uneventful” when “recovery is events, a series of wonderful, unpredictable events … advents, which are births and re-births” (1987:154)?
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While he finds that his recovery is full of adventures and dramas, his healers see things as routine. We investigate a puzzle Sacks raises in trying to understand the perspective of his healers.
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This article considers the role of rehabilitation for those who, in one way or another, confront lesions that run all the way to the center of themselves, when bodies become sources of pain or humiliation, or when they have cracked to the core. It becomes painfully clear to Sacks that what he had initially viewed as a peripheral breakdown was, in fact, a breakdown at the center of things, “not just a lesion in my muscle, but a lesion in me” (1987:66).
With this loss, his very spirit, his imagining, intending, purposeful self is endangered: “I had lost the power to ‘call’ to a part of myself, the power to call on a part of myself” (1987:65).
He has lost his leg altogether, although, strangely, it is still attached to him. He appears to his doctors and therapists as a patient with a leg injury, a local affair, but he knows better. “The neural traffic had stopped, so to speak,” Sacks tells us, “and the streets of the city were deserted and silent” (1987:65). This temporary paralysis was no mere matter of torn tendons, but an injury to the nerves themselves. When Oliver Sacks fell off a mountain, he found himself in a hospital with a leg that would not move.
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