In '99 I received a letter from a very eminent pianist, whom I had heard of, and she described how at a concert in 1990, when there was a sudden change of programme to a different Mozart piano concerto, she... she wanted to refresh herself and glance at the score, and she glanced at the score and found it unintelligible. She... she could see that there were the marks of notes, and the clefs, and the ornaments, but she... it didn’t have any meaning for her. She rubbed her eyes, and... and then, since she had a flawless memory, she played it anyhow, but this, her ability to recognise music fluctuated. At the time this happened, I think she may have had a cold, or whatever. It fluctuated, but by '95 she couldn’t read music at all, and had started to have difficulty... and had started to have difficulty reading print.
But she had no difficulty writing, so she wrote me a letter describing this, and wondering... she was puzzled by it. She said, if she went to an ophthalmologist she could clearly see and copy the tiniest letters on the chart, even though she didn’t know what letters they were, but she could describe their shape. So she came to see me. At that time I was working in an epilepsy centre, which my friend Orrin Devinsky was running, but we saw all sorts of patients, epileptic and otherwise. I spent a lot of time with Lilian Kallir, and so did you, Kate. And I... I really grew to love her. It did not enter my mind at first that I would ever write about her. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it entered her mind, although she had read some of my work.
And after that first consultation I couldn’t find my reflex hammer. It’s over there, the one with a red handle. And I... I looked everywhere, and then I couldn’t find my medical bag. And then Lilian came back, breathless. She said she had taken my medical bag by mistake, and it was only in the taxi, when she saw the red tip of the reflex hammer that she realised this was the case, and so she said, I was the woman who mistook the doctor’s bag for her own handbag, or something of the sort. She could laugh at herself, which was fortunate, because she was in a... really a grim situation, in which her power to recognise anything visually was eroding. I... I wrote about Lilian, and this was in fact the first case history, I think, I’d written in 10 years or so, perhaps since... since Temple Grandin.
