The Island of the Colorblind

Summary (from the publisher): In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this journey, he carried with him the intellectual curiosity, kind understanding, and unique vision he has so consistently demonstrated.

 

Drawn to the Micronesian island of Pingelap by reports of a community of people born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks set up a clinic in a one-room dispensary. There he listened to patients describe their colorless world in terms rich with pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. Then, in Guam, he investigated a puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis, making house calls amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The experience affords Sacks an opportunity to elaborate on such personal passions as botany and history and to explore the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the birth of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time.

Review: In this work of non-fiction, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes his visits to the Micronesian island of Pingelap and later to Guam to investigate the effects of isolation on the incidence of neurological disorders in the small, island communities. In Pingelap, he investigates the large percentage of the population who suffer from total colorblindness, relying instead on pattern and shadows. In Guam, he visits patients suffering from a mysterious neurodegenerative paralysis whose cause has not been uncovered, even as the incidence of the disease seems to have disappeared in the younger generations.

It's thought that achromatopsia, or total colorblindness accompanied by extreme sensitivity to light,
originated in Pingelap in 1775, when a typhoon killed 90% of the island's population, leaving most of the survivors to die of starvation since most of the plants on the island were also destroyed. Only twenty or so survived but as this small group of survivors attempted to repopulate the island, "genetic traits previously rare began to spread, so that in the fourth generation after the typhoon a 'new' disease showed itself. The first children with the Pingelap eye disease were born in the 1820s, and within a few generations their numbers had increased to more than five percent of the population" (37). Elsewhere in the world, the incidence is less than one in 30,000 but on Pingelap it is one in 12. The greatest effects of this disorder, on an island community that cannot seek even basic accommodations like sunglasses, are social. Most sufferers never learn to read, because they cannot see the teacher's writing on the board. Additionally, they are less likely to marry because of a wish not to pass on the disorder and they cannot work outdoors, which limits their options in an already small island economy.

In Guam, the effects of the prevalent neurological disorder is much more devastating. "A tenth of all the adult Chamorro deaths on Guam were due to the disease, and its prevalence was at least a hundred times greater than on the mainland (in some villages, like Umatac, it was over four hundred times greater). Puzzlingly, the disease affects individuals differently, with affected family members exhibiting wildly different symptoms. Some suffered from profound mental and physical slowing and profound immobility. Others had tremors and rigidity. Even more curious, younger generations no longer seem to fall victim to this curious and fatal disease. Although many theories have been postulated for its origins, including consumption of certain species of local plants, no definitive explanation has been achieved.

Similarly to my conclusions after reading An Anthropologist on Mars, I wondered what the intended takeaway is for the reader other than to describe these curious island maladies before they are corrected by time and exposure to a widening genetic pool. Sacks offers no solutions or treatments for the maladies explored in this book. Instead this book reads more like a travel narrative, recounting anecdotes of curiosities encountered on his journey, than a medical book shedding light on neurological conditions. This book reads almost like a rambling conversation with Sacks about his impressions after visiting the islands. Similarly, I found the final chapter of the book, which is devoted solely to island plants, and cycads in particular, sort of random. Although cycads have been thought to cause the neurological disorder found in Guam, the chapter does not connect back to the disorder in any way. However, despite this purely descriptive and rambling nature of the book, I found the neurological disorders he explores fascinating. Only on genetically isolated islands can such genetic anomalies arise. "But islands open up, people die or intermarry; genetic attenuation sets in, and the condition disappears. The life of such a genetic disease in an isolate tends to be six or eight generations, two hundred years perhaps, and then it vanishes, as do its memories and traces, lost in the ongoing stream of time" (177).

Stars: 3.5