While trying to help a patient, a doctor should pay attention to their unique features and difficulties that may arise in the wake of them.
With regard to the case described in the article, the main objective of the surgery was to help Virgil. Nevertheless, he was blind since early childhood, which resulted in a tragedy (Sacks 1). Given that he had a purely visual experience and a world of perceivable objects was hard to understand for Virgil, it was inevitably complex for him to make sense of them. An operation that should have led to a miracle turned out to be a disaster due to neurological and psychological challenges he had to face. Regarding reading, Virgil identified letters easily due to the fact that he studied the alphabet during the period when he was blind. In other terms, the reading process did not require a profound reorientation as the alphabet signs were a part of the world in nonvisual terms.
However, the concepts of distance and shape are understandable for other people, who were learning how to form a complex perception at first sight in their childhood. As for Virgil, his brain was not able to perceive sense based on optic nerve impulses as he has not achieved “perceptual constancy” like others (Sacks 6). Such a situation might lead to “the collapse of perceptual systems,” which happened in this case and caused final blindness (Sacks 8). Thus, not having a flexible child’s brain that allows learning essential skills, such as a language or walking, he experienced great difficulties in the learning process.
To conclude, although any operation is aimed at the patient’s well-being, it is of great importance to take into consideration the individual patient characteristics, especially considering perceptual-cognitive processes, in order to avoid harm.
Works Cited
Sacks, Oliver. “To See and Not See.” New Yorker, 1993, Web.