Outside Event 3

I attended a reading at Burke's Bookstore on April 1st. Molly Crosby was the author reading from her book titled "Asleep." She basically told us the book was about a sleeping sickness that made people stay asleep for various periods of time. Some people would never be able to wake up again from this disease. These particular cases happened around the 1920s. Molly Crosby read to us a prolouge from her book. The prolouge was about her grandmother who had the disease during this time. Molly said her grandmother eventually woke up after 180 days of sleeping. After her grandmother waking up, Molly said her grandmother seemed to live a normal life giving birth to four children, but the family members always knew something had changed about her after the sleeping sickness. She had not been completely there in the head. I thought Molly's reasoning for writing this was amazing. This was a thing that happened personally with her grandmother, and there are many others that have suffered from this disease. Molly wanted to figure out what exactly happened with her grandmother and why. I believe this gave her the motivation to keep researching and trying to find out all that she could about the disease. Molly was asked a question about her researching methods. Molly said she would go and read old journals and records of patients with the disease. Some of the records in certain buildings were burned away unfortunately. I thought that if these records were not burned, maybe there could have been better information regarding the sleeping sickness disease. Molly told us that she was inspired by Dr. Oliver Sacks. Dr. Sacks wrote a book similar called "Awakenings," which Molly talked about for a few minutes. I liked reading the book by Dr. Oliver Sacks, however, I thought Molly Crosby did a fantastic job of writing in her book as well. She seemed more informing to me and I was able to get a better sense of the disease. It was also interesting hearing the part where she talked about the frontal lobes. The lobes are not completely developed until your mid 20's. We learned that in psychology this semester, and it was very interesting how all of this was relating to each other. Overall, I thought this was my favorite outside event this year. I liked the subject matter that was being discussed, and it was interesting to see a good example how science and english go hand in hand. The research is difficult and takes a large amount of effort to get done correctly. I thought Molly Crosby was an extremely intelligent woman and I enoyed being able to listen to her talk.