DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE

Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge: translation

(1832-1898)

   Better known as Lewis Carroll. A British mathematician, and member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), as well as an author of children's books, who is probably best known for his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.As suggested in 1952 by the American neurologist Caro W. Lippman (1886-1954), Dodgson may have suffered from migraine with aura, and the writer's own experiences as a migraineur may have been a source of inspiration for some of Alice's adventures. In this vein the British psychiatrist John Todd (1914-1987) introduced the term *Alice in Wonderland syndrome in 1955 to denote a rare group of symptoms comprising subjective feelings such as * hyperschematia, derealiza-tion, depersonalization, and somatopsychic duality, as well as perceptual symptoms such as illusory changes in the size, distance, or position of stationary objects within the subject's visual field (i.e.*micropsia, *macropsia, *macroproxiopia, *microtelepsia, *teleopsia, and *plagiopsia), illusory feelings oflevitation, and illusory alterations in the passage of time. In a paper published in 2002, the German psychiatrist Klaus Podoll and the curator of migraine art Derek Robinson (1928-2001) drew attention to the split body image of Sylvie in Dodgson's book Sylvie and Bruno, and speculated that Dodgson may have used a migraine-associated illusion of his own as a source of inspiration for this image as well. An alternative explanation for Dodgson's references to the above perceptual symptoms stems from the American historian and author Michael Carmichael. According to Carmichael, Dodgson had either read about the hallucinogenic effects of the mushroom Amanita muscaria,orexperi-mented with the mushroom himself.

   References

   Carmichael, C. (1996). Wonderland revisited. London Miscellany, 28, 19-28.

   Carroll, L. (1865). Alice's adventures in Wonderland. London: D. Appleton and Co.

   Carroll, L. (1889). Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan

   Kew, J., Wright, A., Halligan, P.W. (1998). Somes-thetic aura: The experience of "Alice in Wonderland". Lancet, 351, 1934.

   Lippman, C.W. (1952). Certain hallucinations peculiar to migraine. Journal ofNervous and Mental Diseases, 116, 346-351.

   Todd, J. (1955). The syndrome of Alice in Wonderland. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 73, 701-704.

Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge: translation

(1832–1898)

English mathematician, logician, and humorous writer, better known as Lewis Carroll. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Carroll spent his entire career there as a mathematician. He wrote upon the theory of voting and various mathematical and logical issues, as well as filling Alice in Wonderland (1865), Alice through the Looking Glass (1871), and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) with play upon logical, philosophical, and semantic themes. Humpty Dumpty exhibits a form of the Euthyphro dilemma in his views on his authority over his words; the White Knight delves deep into the problem of names, the White King takes ’nobody’ to be a person; the Snark is a topic-neutral object of a quest (sometimes identified with the Absolute), and throughout the humour depends upon pushing logical and philosophical reasoning to absurdity. Carroll's paper ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’ (Mind, 1895) presents the classic statement of the need for rules of inference as well as axioms in formal systems.