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merry with the images,” Bonnet wrote of his grandfather. “His brain is a theatre where the stage machinery puts on performances which are all the more amazing because they are unexpected.”
    Sometimes the hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome can inspire. Virginia Hamilton Adair wrote poetry as a young woman, publishing in the
Atlantic Monthly
and the
New Republic
. She continued to write poems during her career as a scholar and professor of English in California, but these, for the most part, remained unpublished. It was not until she was eighty-three and completely blind from glaucoma that she published her first book of poetry, the acclaimed
Ants on the Melon
. Two further collections followed, and in these new poems she made frequent reference to the Charles Bonnet hallucinationsthat now visited her regularly, the visions given to her by “the angel of hallucinations,” as she put it.
    Adair and, later, her editor sent me extracts from the journal she kept in the last years of her life. They were full of descriptions she dictated of her hallucinations as they occurred, including this:
    I am maneuvered into a delightfully soft chair. I sink, submerged as usual in shades of night … the sea of clouds at my feet clears, revealing a field of grain, and standing about it a small flock of fowl, not two alike, in somber plumage: a miniature peacock, very slender, with its little crest and unfurled tail feathers, some plumper specimens, and a shore bird on long stems, etc. Now it appears that several are wearing shoes, and among them a bird with four feet. One expects more color among a flock of birds, even in the hallucinations of the blind.… The birds have turned into little men and women in medieval attire, all strolling away from me. I see only their backs, short tunics, tights or leggings, shawls or kerchiefs.… Opening my eyes on the smoke screen of my room I am treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit. The familiar milkman invaded the scene in his azure cart with the golden horse; he joined us a few days ago out of some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box.… But the magic lantern show of colored oddities has faded and I am back in black-wall country without form or substance … where I landed as the lights went out.
    1 . Draaisma’s book provides not only a vivid account of Bonnet’s life and work, but fascinating reconstructions of the lives of a dozen other major figures in neurology whose names are now remembered mostly for the syndromes named after them: Georges Gilles de la Tourette, James Parkinson, Alois Alzheimer, Joseph Capgras, and others.
    2 . Or so it would seem. Recently I came across a marvelous 1845 report by Truman Abell, a physician who started to lose his sight in his fifty-ninth year and had become totally blind by 1842, four years later. He described this in an article for the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
.
    “In this situation,” he wrote, “I often dreamed of having my sight restored, and of seeing the most beautiful landscapes. At length these landscapes began to appear in miniature
when awake
: small fields, a few feet square, would appear, clothed with green grass, and other vegetables, some in bloom. These would continue two or three minutes, and then disappear.” The landscapes were followed by an immense variety of other “illusions”—Abell did not use the word “hallucinations”—provided by “an internal sight.”
    Over the course of several months, his visions increased in complexity. His “silent, but impudent visitors” were sometimes intrusive, with three or four people who would sit on his bed or “come to my bed-side, stoop down over me, and look directly into my eyes.” (Often his