This is the story of an accident that happened to my body seven years ago. It’s a personal narrative which, I hope, escapes the charge of self indulgence because it’s told for a reason: that is, what such stories can say about the universal human experience of living in a body.

The accident, which was a severe fracture to my right arm, became a kind of research project. When I’m not falling over and breaking limbs, I’m a social scientist. I do research. I go to the library, define a question, start a journey. My questions in the case of Fracture were these: Why does breaking an arm seem to fracture the psyche as well? What is the nature of the predicament of losing the full use of one’s right hand because of an accident? Why does losing sensation in one’s hand feel so important? Why does Western medicine treat function and ignore the patient’s experience of sensation? How are hands connected to minds and self-awareness? What is the relationship between right and left hands, and how does body asymmetry work – or not? What role do ‘nerves’ play in the architecture of the human body? How do cultural views about women’s bodies, and about ageing bodies, affect the subjective experience of fracturous events? And what can all this tell us about the general experience of being human and living in a body?

Answering these questions is what the rest of this book is about. Fracture combines my personal story with those of others, and with history, anthropology, neurology, and the sociology of the body, health and illness. My accident led me to confront the intrinsic puzzle of how we can’t do without the body, but would often like to. Our bodies aren’t ourselves; they let us down, get us into all sorts of tangles. What happens to them, what they do to us, can permanently change our lives.

Since the accident that begins Fracture happened to me and I conducted the research project of this book, any errors the reader spots must be mine. Key names in my story have been changed, and so have other identifying details, for obvious reasons. At times, this has resulted in a blurring of the normal dividing line between fact and fiction.