Photography

Once, when my nephew Jonathan was a few months old, I picked up a packed of X-rays marked "J. Sacks" that had been left in the lounge. I started to leaf through them curiously, then perplexedly, then with horror -- for Jonathan was a nice-looking little baby, and no one would have guessed, without the X-rays, that he was hideously deformed. His pelvis, his little legs -- they scarcely looked human.

I went to my mother with the X-rays, shaking my head. "Poor Jonathan . . . " I started.

My mother looked puzzled. "Jonathan?" she said. "Jonathan is fine."

"But the X-rays," I said, "I've been looking at his X-rays."

My mother looked blank, then burst into a roar of laughter, and laughed until tears ran down her face. "J" did not stand for Jonathan, she finally said, but for another member of the household, Jezebel. Jezebel, our new boxer, had had some blood in her urine, and my mother had taken her to hospital to have a kidney X-ray. What I had taken for grotesquely deformed human anatomy was, in fact, perfectly normal canine anatomy. How could I have made such an absurd mistake? The least knowledge, the least common sense, would have made it all clear to me -- my mother, a professor of anatomy, shook her head in disbelief.

-- Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (New York: Knopf, 2001), 240.