In the fall of 1967, McLuhan was diagnosed with a large brain tumour which was removed in a day-long operation. Throughout the decade before he had suffered from blackouts and severe headaches. And in 1960 he had experienced a life-threatening stroke.

In Letters (175), the start of McLuhan’s blackouts is dated to 1959. But when the family drove out to California to spend the summer of 1958 in Santa Barbara, Corinne did the driving. This must mean that Marshall was already experiencing blackouts at that time. It is entirely conceivable, indeed, that Corinne had already had the frightening experience of one of Marshall’s blackouts when he was driving. However that may have been, Marshall’s blackouts must have started by 1958, if not a year or two earlier, and whenever that was, Corinne would not have let him drive thereafter. Then in 1960 he suffered a stroke from which it was feared he would die. From that near fatal event until his brain tumour was removed seven years later, he was continually agitated.  The passages below describe his state during this decade between 1957 and 1967.

Judith Fitzgerald, Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy, 2001, 97

In a note attached to the [NAEB] Report (on Understanding New Media, 1960), McLuhan reveals his health has broken under the stress of prolonged overwork on the project. He’s recently been released from hospital and his doctor insists he take a good long rest, advice a hospital-phobe such as McLuhan (…) is inclined to follow. Ted Carpenter, McLuhan s long-time U of T friend and fellow Ford-Foundation researcher, confirms McLuhan did indeed suffer a stroke earlier that year, a stroke that caused such alarm his employer (and confessor) Father John Kelly was summoned to administer the Last Rites. When McLuhan returns to teaching (…), however, he cavalierly pretends he never suffered a stroke. But his family and close friends can clearly see the toll it’s taken: the man who was a robust and animated specimen has turned into an old man overnight. His nervous intensity’s more pronounced. He’s incapable of relaxing for more than five minutes at a stretch. 

Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan : you know nothing of my work!, 2010, 132

Producing the [NAEB] book came with a price. The two years spent making it were arguably the most exploration-rich of Marshall’s life. But the stress on his brain took a toll. In early 1960 he suffered a stroke so severe that a priest was called in for last rites. Marshall survived but was forced to rest by his doctor. The medical event was kept under wraps, and in the fall of 1961, Marshall resumed teaching, with only a few people close to him aware of the intellectual and physical journey he’d been on.

Ted Carpenter, ‘On McLuhan and Explorations‘, 2011¹

 the [1960 NAEB] book was a disaster, Marshall was very sick to the point where they administered the last rights (…) Marshall had a seizure (…) and it changed his personality (…) Marshall was a changed person after that stroke or seizure or whatever it was. He was a different person. There would be times when the old Spirit would come back (…) but there were other times of chaos and it was quite sad (…) believe me I saw things that I would prefer not to have seen (…) I moved [from California] to join Marshall at Fordham University [in 1967] and that did not work out, he was not well, he was quite ill… 

Ted Carpenter, ‘That Not-So-Silent Sea’, 2001²

Marshall asked me to join him at Fordham. Thanks to [Howard] Gossage’s obedient journalists, he was now internationally famous, the world’s first celebrity scholar. He was also very ill. A brain tumor was removed. Warmth & brilliance faded. I recall a moment backstage before he faced an audience of executives. He called for “the book”. “The book” was A Thousand and One Jokes for All Occasions. Several were chosen at random and read to him. He laughed at each, though all were awful. In the end that didn’t matter: he mixed up punch lines, leaving his audience thoroughly perplexed. One listener asked for help in unraveling what he assumed was a deliberate riddle. Others dismissed the speaker as fraudulent or mad. Yet even in the worst scenes, there could be wit. (…) The Fordham effort collapsed. Marshall returned to Toronto. (…) The exuberant, witty rainmaker was now a wary, irritable jukebox reciting old phrases in random order. (…) It was so different when we first met, at his home in a great old house, once St. Mike’s infirmary. He stood before the fireplace, Corinne beside him, the fire bright, the two of them tall, extremely handsome, she regal, he witty, punning, quoting jazz lyrics, classics, Yeats, headlines, slang, ads, a Joycean display, then singing, not McCormack, but full of fun.

In the following passages from McLuhan himself, it may be taken that his descriptions of the effects of electric technology are less sociology than they are confessions of his own state at the time. The numbing and ‘autoamputation’ he describes befell him concretely with his stroke and blackouts. Meanwhile the general anxiety and dread before “the condition of man” would have been his position of uncertainty as to when the next blackout or stroke would occur and how long he would live at all.³

McLuhan, ‘Prospect’, 1962

we have projected our brains and nerves outside [ourselves]. Telegraph, radio, television, telephone really are extensions of our central nervous system (…) We’re putting (…) our most intimate selves, outside (…) the brains and nerves of man around the globe. (…) Now, when we put our nerves outside, we become of course vulnerable to the nth degree; in fact, we barely survive from day to day. Mere existence becomes one of perpetual anxiety. (…) We now have an unimaginably harassed [life] by putting our nerves outside ourselves; it is like living without a skin (…) when you put the nervous system outside, fear is no longer the problem, anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total (…) you don’t know now precisely what you’re dreading, rather it’s a pervasive state. The [very] condition of man is what you dread (…) a very heightened kind of existence, a sort of nightmare.

McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964⁴

The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology (…) We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die.

McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964⁵

There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of physical and psychic trauma or shock. A person suddenly deprived of loved ones⁶ and a person who drops a few feet unexpectedly will both register shock. Both the loss of family and a physical fall [effect]⁷ amputations of the self. Shock induces a generalized numbness or an increased threshold [limiting or preventing]⁸ all types of perception. (…) The person who falls suddenly experiences immunity to all pain or sensory stimuli because the central nervous system has to be protected from any intense thrust of sensation. Only gradually does he regain normal sensitivity to sights and sounds, at which time he may begin to tremble and perspire and to react as he would have done if the central nervous system had been prepared in advance for the fall that occurred unexpectedly.⁹

McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964¹⁰

Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as “autoamputation” and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. (…) Such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception (…) a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition. (…) Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the central nervous system, is to act as a buffer against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment. (…) With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests [the need for] a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure.