While sitting in a Budapest café, writer Frigyes Karinthy (1887–1938) suddenly heard the roaring of a train, without there being a train station nearby. The roaring noise he heard over and over again turned out to be an auditory hallucination, and the writer’s calvary began. Even though he fainted on several occasions and his eyesight deteriorated severely, at first neither he nor his doctors suspected serious illness. However, as his symptoms became more and more severe, he arrived at the conclusion that he must have a brain tumor. The self-diagnosis proved to be right (”I went from humorist to tumorist,” he recounted later), and he soon left for Stockholm to be operated upon by the most famous neurosurgeon of his times, Herbert Olivecrona. During the operation, only local anaesthetic was used, allowing the writer to describe the whole process – including an out-of-body experience – in minute detail. The book, as Oliver Sacks writes in his introduction to the new edition (published in a slightly different form in the March 20, 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books), is ”not just an elaborate case history; it depicts the complex impact of a sight-, mind- and life-threatening illness on a man of extraordinary sensibility and talent, and even something approaching genius, in the prime of his life. It becomes a journey of insight, of symbolic stages.” | 
