Summary

When looking at the history of ideas and scientific discoveries, one realizes that it is not a continuum. For example, in the 1670s, John Mayow "all but discovered" oxygen, and yet, his work was forgotten and obscured and the father of modern chemistry is remembered as Antoine Lavoisier who's work came along a century later. Sacks writes that "such forgetting or neglect of history is not uncommon" and he himself has experienced it with his work on migraine. When contemporary research recorded no evidence of some of the symptoms described by his patients, Sacks turned to Victorian literature where the same symptoms were described and yet had been lost to history. Sacks again had a similar experience when working on Tourette's syndrome in 1969-70. Sacks questions these instances of forgetting or neglect of discoveries and wonders how contemporary pressures...