In my first year at UCLA I saw a patient with a... with a thing called myoclonus, it’s sudden muscular spasms, which, in her case, were brought on by flickering lights, and had been in her family for five generations. But this incited me to write a book, a little book on myoclonus. Oh, this is a... oh, I don't know... well, a dull story. The... at that time in the States the expert on myoclonus was a neurologist called Luttrell, and he, in fact, came to UCLA as an invigilator, or examiner, in the boards of neurology. And I wasn’t doing the boards, but I went up to him shyly and said that I had liked his... I loved his papers on myoclonus and I’d... I'd written a little book on it myself, and... and I’d very much appreciate his advice.
And I gave him the manuscript, of which there was no copy, and I didn’t get an answer. And then when I enquired about six weeks later, I heard that Luttrell was dead and, in fact, that he had committed suicide, and, I think, I may have partly felt that perhaps my... my little book had driven him to suicide. But I also felt that I should perhaps write a letter of condolence, but not mention anything so vulgar as the returning of the manuscript, and so... so my 1962 book on myoclonus may still exist somewhere.