Hi David
This is part of an article on John Davis 11
An emblem of his wealth became an instrument of his destruction when he wrecked his Jaguar automobile in January 1964. Brain damage was quickly confirmed by EEG and the impairment was diagnosed as progressive. John Davis continued to practice law despite increasingly frequent seizures and deteriorating mental function. Even in 1968, he was asked to work in Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. But as he told Steve LeVine, an A.P. writer who interviewed him in 1983, by 1969 he could not function at all. By that time his career had effectively ended.
He fought disbarment, even while his facilities continued to decline. His wife divorced him and he finally suffered an indefinite suspension of his license to practice on his birthday in 1977, July 12. In 1976 Davis literally became a homeless derelict, spending nights in hospital waiting rooms, under highway bridges, and in graveyards. The severity of his impairment was summarized in a report dated December 13, 1976, by Donald C. Carter, M.D. of the School of Medicine of West Virginia University: This man's cognitive functions are grossly impaired...[T]he overwhelming evidence from my examination is that of cognitive deficit, unregulated emotional control and severe memory and judgment impairment. The long, agonizing descent into hell of John Davis ended suddenly on the day in 1977 when his doctor and friend, Edward Lewis, told him that he had less than one year to live. He walked into the Spring Hill cemetery in Charleston where he often slept, carrying his Styrofoam "bed." It was there that he had his deep spiritual experience that was to be so dramatically validated.
As he told Steve LeVine: I didn't see lights, didn't hear voices echoing from the mountaintop, didn't have any mission sent upon me, except being a human being...I felt my whole brain reorganize. I learned more things that night than I'll ever be able to explain. He described the experience as a "sense of kinship, a oneship with the universe." Davis never had another seizure. He immediately began a rigorous program of exercise, reading and-most importantly concentration. He discovered pranayama, the Hindu art of breath control, and kundalini yoga, and employed them as techniques to retrain his mind and body. He had virtually lost his faculty of speech, once one of his brightest jewels, and practiced speaking in front of a mirror with his mouth full of marbles.
An EEG performed on July 29, 1979 was completely normal. Dr. Carter, who in 1976 considered him to be permanently and totally disabled, reported on April 11, 1980: "Mr. Davis was found to be healed of his cognitive, emotional and attitudinal problems...the healing process has very adequately compensated and remedied these defects to a remarkable degree, not previously thought possible.
On May 31, 1979, his longtime personal physician, Dr. Lewis wrote: When Mr. Davis in the summer of 1977 undertook to rehabilitate himself, his physical health, alone, was perilous, perilous in the extreme. But it has been my clinical experience that for a few highly motivated patients, a trauma or ordeal such as Mr. Davis experienced of losing the right to practice their profession, their livelihood and even their home, sometimes is a catalyst to cause them to be able, under close medical supervision, to arrest their progressively worsening condition and reach a sort of equilibrium where minimal functioning can be maintained. This is not infrequently reported in our journals, and even occasionally observed in our clinical experience. But for a person to be able to self-motivate themselves and so mobilize their physical and psychic energies so as to make the simply astonishing complete physical, emotional and mental recovery, as to become as fully functioning as has Mr. Davis, is unique in my clinical experience. It just is not found in our medical books! In 1976, John Davis's score on the WAIS Performance IQ test was 112, only a little above average and far below what would be expected from someone of outstanding educational and professional achievement. In 1980, his score on the same test was 156. Dr. Carter's colleague, Dr. Quarrick, said:
This score is outstandingly high and is in sharp contrast to the mediocre one obtained previously. Neither the psychometrician nor myself have ever seen such a high Performance IQ. In fact, it is 8 points shy of the highest score that can be statistically generated by this test. So John Davis was restored to his license to practice law, with the help of attorney Rudolph DiTrapano who had employed him as a law clerk during his recovery. And he was remarried to his former wife, Ruth. But he was somehow more than what he had been before. Although he spoke with some apparent strain and effort, his eloquence was somehow greater. …..
He was a young man in a hurry, but it was his intellect that shone forth and won him the honors. It is from the graveyard experience that the new man begins to emerge. John Davis struggled mightily to convey the message that he brought back from the graveyard. And if his poems do not always reach the highest level of art, they never fail to convey the passionate intensity of a man who knew, beyond doubt, what is, and what reality awaits every struggling soul. sooner or later.
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