Among the books my friend Ian sent me was a book by Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher - the latter being a profession he shared with Ian, who was a philosophy graduate from the University of Edinburgh.
Ian apologised for the underlining which, he said, defaced the book, but the book was a treasure, underlined or not.
It did, however, remind me of my crimes in the underlining category.
When I first began studying anatomy at university, I underlined everything I thought was important in the anatomy text (R.J. Last - "Anatomy, Regional and Applied"), and after a few months realized that I had underlined every word, apart from indefinite articles and conjunctions, but could recall very little.
It occurred to me that, by some neurological phenomenon, the information I had read had passed through my eyes and travelled down my right arm to the underlining pen, bypassing my brain.
The same phenomenon occurred in lectures if I took notes. I would leave the lecture theater with pages of notes but no memory whatsoever of what the lecturer had said.
It seemed that a similar neurological pathway had been activated - viz ears, arm, hand - bypassing the brain.
After that, I simply read the books and listened to the lectures, and remembered almost everything.
All my text books from then on - through university, while I was studying for my specialist exams and during my consultant career - remained undefiled.
The fact that I now have to write myself notes to remind me to empty my bladder is neither here nor there.
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