The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a translation of the French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes what his life is like after suffering a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome.
The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid. An amanuensis repeatedly recited a frequency-ordered alphabet, until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about two hundred thousand blinks to write and each word took approximately two minutes. The book chronicles everyday events and what they are like for a person with locked-in syndrome. These events include playing at the beach with his family, getting a bath, and meeting visitors. The book was published on March 6, 1997. It received excellent reviews and sold 150,000 copies in the first week. Two days after the French version of the book was published, Bauby died.
[edit] External links
Reviews of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly:
- Literature, Arts, and Medicine database includes some background to the story and some quotations from the book.
- http://www.thei.aust.com/isite/btl/btlbauby.html contains additional background material.
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