The Invisible Smile

Jonathan Cole (MA, MSc, DM, FRCP) was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford and The Middlesex Hospital and while there did his medical elective in New York with Oliver Sacks. He completed his training in London before returning to Oxford and then Southampton to do research. He now is a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and an academic, with over 70 papers and 200 publications in the control of movement without sensory feedback, affective or emotional touch and in chronic pain. He also believes that one must understand chronic impairment from a subjective, first person account and has published a series of books, on sensory loss, facial visible difference and spinal cord injury, exploring the first person experience of these conditions. He also collaborates with philosophers and choreographers on the consequences of his work for notions of embodiment and affective movement/position sense. Henrietta Spalding (BA Hons) read Russian and American Studies at Keele University graduating in 1992. She spent 12 years working in education both in the UK and abroad. She has taught a wide variety of nationalities and ages of students from 5 year old upwards and including business teaching and Higher Education. Whilst living abroad she helped set up a support group for individuals and their families with Moebius Syndrome. On returning to the UK, five years ago, she became involved in the national charity, Changing Faces, which supports and represents individuals with disfigurements. She now heads their Professionals' Programme working to ensure every health clinic, school and workplace in the country is informed, skilled and able to address the psycho-social needs of people with disfigurements. She also lives with Moebius Syndrome herself.

We face people every daybut what if a rare congenital malady deprives a child of the power to smile or frown, to have any facial expression whatever? Dr Cole is an expert on this condition, and, along with Henrietta Spalding, who grew up with Möbius Syndrome herself, he presents the life stories of people with this neurological conditionand the varied ways in which they cope and adapt. Cole writes vividly, but with delicacy and sympathy, combining deeply personal portraits with pioneering scientific insight.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. Somebody home ; 3. Balancing acts ; 4. Cartesian children ; 5. Part of me ; 6. The spectator ; 7. Elastic between us ; 8. Hear my smile ; 9. 'Doomed to express' ; 10. Changing of the rules ; 11. Every second of the day ; 12. Not about anything ; 13. Rusty old car ; 14. The last why