Lying Awake

Medicine through the novel: Lying Awake.

Narrative fiction can engage readers in generating imaginative recreations of the inner worlds of doctors and patients, which are largely inaccessible through typical clinical case analysis. Fiction about medicine can yield insight into patients' subjective experience of illness and can highlight the need for an empathetic response from doctors to patients affected by illness. Mark Salzman's no...

Lying and Deception Lying and Self-deception

Questions about truthfulness occur in many contexts—when parents ask their children if they are using recreational drugs, when an employer ask applicants about the reasons they left their last job, when international leaders consider each others’ threats or promises, when voters evaluate candidates’ promises, when physicians consider a patient’s complaint, when at the start of a romantic encoun...

Lying Awake Mark Salzman, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2000. £14.99 (hardback), 181pp. ISBN 0-7475-5740-3.

The pairing of religiosity with illness is not an unfamiliar theme on which to base a novel. Mark Salzman’s ‘Lying Awake’ uses this device to explore the intertwining of monastic life and neurological illness through the depiction of Helen Nye/Sister John of the Cross’s life in a Carmelite convent. Sister John, as she is named after a year as a postulant, suffers from severe headaches that are ...

Acute changes in cardiovascular function during the onset period of daytime sleep: comparison to lying awake and standing.

The siesta habit is associated with a 37% reduction in coronary mortality, possibly because of reduced cardiovascular stress associated with daytime sleep. Whether the most important behavior is the daytime nap itself, a supine posture, or the expectancy of a nap is unknown. We present the first detailed description on healthy individuals of the acute changes in cardiovascular function during d...

Pathological Lying