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By Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jeremy Leggatt, trans)
144 pp, $12.95
New York, NY, Knopf Publishing Group, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-3073-8925-1

JAMA. 2008;300(24):2924-2925.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the 42-year-old editor of the French edition of Elle, sustained a brainstem stroke. On recovering from a 20-day coma, he was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome, conscious but aphasic and incapable of purposeful voluntary movements apart from the use of his left eye. An ingenious communication scheme was devised in which a rearranged alphabet of letters was read to Bauby, who would blink each time the letter he had in mind was said, eventually spelling out words. Over 2 months, Bauby "dictated" an autobiography, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The scale of this accomplishment cannot be understated. Each morning, without the benefit of a pen and paper—his tools as an editor—Bauby had to compose, memorize, and edit tracts of writing that he would then "dictate" later that day. The book—published 2 days after his death in 1997—became a sensation, selling more than 1.2 million . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Numbere Numbere, MBBS, BSc, Reviewer
Departments of Hematology and Oncology
Christie Hospital
Manchester, United Kingdom
numbere@doctors.org.uk

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