• neuropsychiatry
• somatisation disorder

Following our inaugural Edinburgh Neurology Book Club, we tackled The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves 1, by Siri Hustvedt, an internationally renowned scholar and author. This book is about functional symptoms, a common but sometimes challenging presentation.

Ms Hustvedt suffers a shaking episode while delivering a memorial speech about her father, shaking uncontrollably from the neck down but retaining the ability to speak. This is followed by a number of similar episodes, nearly all while public speaking. These events shake her perception of herself, and lead her to explore the themes of psychosomatic disorders, mind–body duality, and the nature of being human, in a free-form, expansive and at times perplexing essay.

This is a book with a laudable aim, to illuminate a stigmatised …