Horizon - The Man who Lost his Body (1998)

In 1971 Ian Waterman was a butcher on Jersey. He was nineteen newly qualified and working flat out to make a go of the business. Then suddenly he went down with what seemed to be gastric flu. But it wasnt. He became wobbly and weak. Within days he had collapsed and was in hospital unable to move or feel his body.He has never regained that feeling yet against all the odds he has made an apparently miraculous recovery. HORIZON tells Ians extraordinary story. Ian had contracted a disease of the nervous system so rare that the doctors on Jersey were unable to diagnose it. It had destroyed all the sensory nerves responsible for touch and for conveying information about muscle and joint position senses so fundamental to our capacity to move in the world that they have been called a sixth sense.Without this "proprioception" we can have no inner sense of posture or limb position and cannot initiate or control movement. Ian was told that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. But Ian wasnt paralysed and he was determined that he was going to lead as normal a life as he could.With the help of physiotherapists he discovered that he could regain control of his limbs through his eyes. So long as he could see the limbs he was moving he could will his muscles into action and monitor their movements. Doggedly he taught himself to stand and walk to use cutlery and a pen to pick up mugs of tea and to gesture convincingly while talking but each movement required unfaltering conscious effort.Ian has confounded the predictions of the specialists. He has found ways of performing tasks that should be impossible for him. In doing so he has become an expert not only on his own anatomy and nervous system but also on the physics of movement and space.Fourteen years ago Ian met Jonathan Cole a neurologist with special interest in the way the brain controls movement. Jonathan recognised that for Ian to move and gesture in the way that he does he must be controlling his motor ne...

Channel: veehd Video Length: 48m 31s Date Found: Sat, Nov 06 2010 6:14 AM Category: Educational Date Produced: View Count: 0