August 27, 2023

Dear Benjamin,

Thank you for your two telephone calls. Your reference to neuroanatomy as an anchor to knowledge and understanding of what is real, reminded me of wrestling with this subject 73 years ago, and in its wake recollecting smidgeon of "knowledge" bobbing in turbulent whirlpools of ignorance and scepticism. I remember my perplexity when one of my instructors in surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital described to his students the lumbar sympathectomy he had just performed on a patient who complained of plantar hyperhidrosis. I remember my consternation at the indifference, if not approval with which my neurology instructors condoned pre-frontal lobotomies as treatment for the pervasive sorrow and sadness which psychiatrists conventionally mock with the label "depression".  That the originator of pre-frontal lobotomy, the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the "discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses" I consider emblematic for the cultural, intellectual and spiritual depravity of both the Nobel Academy and of the neurological profession at that time.  Following Moniz's initial leucotomy procedures, other physicians, including American neurologists Walter Freeman and James Winston Watts, enthusiastically adopted and refined the procedure.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_II It will be your prerogative and perhaps your obligation to yourself to ascertain to what degree, if at all, your profession has changed.  During my medical school years, Stanley Cobb was the neurological éminence grise in Boston. Cobb's ultimate intellectual concern was the "mind-body" problem, which he resolved with the conclusion that this problem did not exist, because only "body" was real and "mind" was fiction, "nothing more" than an entanglement of "body" so complex that it has yet to be unraveled. Reflecting now on the subsequent seventy years, I conclude that I spent them in meditating on the alternate possibility that it is my consciousness, my thinking, which is immediate to me, and that my thought is my only access to the world in which I live.

Dear Benjamin, please feel under no obligation to answer this letter, and feel free to telephone me whenever you feel like it. Best wishes to both of you.

Love, Jochen