Jean-Dominique Bauby
Paralysed except for one eyelid, he blinked a whole book into existence and died two days after it appeared
Jean-Dominique Bauby was a Paris journalist who had risen to become editor-in-chief of the French edition of Elle, a job of lunches, fast cars and deadlines. On 8 December 1995, at 43, he suffered a massive stroke while driving with his young son and fell into a coma. He woke three weeks later to find that he could not move or speak. He could hear, think and see, and he could blink his left eye. Nothing else. The condition is called locked-in syndrome.
He was moved to a naval hospital at Berck-sur-Mer on the Channel coast. A speech therapist devised a system: someone would recite the alphabet, arranged in order of how often each letter is used in French, and he would blink when the right one came. A word could take two minutes. With this, and an assistant from his publisher, Claude Mendibil, who came each day for two months in the summer of 1996 and sat with him for hours, he composed a book in his head each night and dictated it in the morning, letter by letter, something like two hundred thousand blinks.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly describes his body as the diving bell and his mind as the butterfly that still flies out to the places and meals and people he remembers. It is short, funny and without self-pity. It was published in France on 7 March 1997 and was an immediate success. He died of pneumonia two days later.