Oliver Sacks agrees (or is it the other way around?)

For the past few days I have been haphazardly picking at Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (a book I first started reading in 2003).

Last night, while reading the section on Tourette's Syndrome I was struck by his discussion of a concept that seemed to parallel something I posted about a few days ago - our inclination to overlook concepts/ideas that aren't appropriately named.  Of course, Sacks's take on concepts without names, or johnny-come-lately re-remembered names, is a little more elegant than mine.

The day after seeing Ray, it seemed to me that I noticed three Touretters in the street in downtown New York.  I was confounded, for Tourette's syndrome was said to be excessively rare.  It had an incidence, I had read, of one in a million, yet I had apparently seen three examples in an hour.  I was thrown into a turmoil of bewilderment and wonder: was it possible that had been overlooking this all the time, either not seeing such patients or vaguely dismissing them as 'nervous', 'cracked', 'twitchy'?  Was it possible that everyone had been overlooking them?  Was it possible that Tourette's was not a rarity, but rather common - a thousand times more common, say, than previously supposed?  

Sacks also includes a nice footnote with another example of such an instance.

A very similar situation happened with muscular dystrophy, which was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s.  By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: "How come that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how come it is only recognised now?  Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?"

I can't help but wonder how many unnamed concepts are floating about whose naming would be of great use in my day to day life?