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WhyOliverSacksAlwaysGoesTooFarTheAtlantic
MICHAEL ROTH
MAY 16, 2015
HEALTH
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When the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was a schoolboy,
a teacher noted on his report card: Sacks will go far, if he does not go too
far. It was a perceptive comment, for as it turned out, going too far was
something Sacks would do throughout his life. The child pushed the limits
of his chemistry set until the house filled with smoke, the young man filled
himself with drugs at first for pleasure and experimentationand then
because of addiction. Recreational swimming would last for several hours
in choppy waters, motorcycle rides would cross a continent, working out
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Robert DeNiro (as a patient). Sacks powerfully described his work with
hospitalized patients seemingly frozen in a decades-long Parkinsonian
sleep. For many years merely warehoused, they received from him the gift
of attention; and then he treated them with the experimental drug LDOPA, which seemed to bring them back to life. The physical awakenings
turned out to be short-lived, alas, but the book raised powerful questions
as to how we recognize and care for people living with, or rather alive
within, profound illness.
Although he has always taken voluminous notes on his patients and filled
hundreds of thousands of journal pages on myriad ideas that compelled
him, Sacks often suffered from writers block. He tells us of his struggle to
finish Awakenings, finally doing so as a tribute to his recently deceased
mother. Sacks tribute parallels Freuds writing of The Interpretation of
Dreams, which he had described as a reaction to the loss of his father. Both
men lost a parent when they were about 40Freud turning his attention to
his patients dreams, Sacks striving to help his patients awaken from their
slumbers.
Sacks sees himself in the tradition of Freud and of the Russian neurologist
A. R. Luria, medical men who took upon themselves the depiction of the
fullness of a patients life and not just the course of an illness. Their case
studies are powerful narratives, and Sacks, too, wanted his clinical
portraits to be recognized as literary achievements. When his friend, the
poet W.H. Auden, praised Awakenings as a masterpiece, Sacks tells us he
wept.
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recognition, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) turned the
neurologist/author into a public figure. The case study for which the
collection is entitled is of a man with visual agnosia, the inability to
recognize objects, even people. Sacks helps us see the world from this
mans perspective, and from the points of view of those who cared about
him. Sacks has does the same for people with Tourretes, aphasia, amnesia,
autism. Hes written before about his own prosopagnosia, which hinders
his ability to recognize the faces of people he knowseven those he knows
well. As a writer, he shifts our gaze from the horror of deficits to the
wonder at the human ability to find a way to make sense of, even thrive in,
an altered world. He says of his subjects that [t]heir conditions were
fundamental to their lives and often a source of originality and creativity.
Sacks, often drawing on his own suffering, doesnt romanticize the horror
that many of his patients have faced over the years. He just recognizes that
there is no prescribed path of recovery; patients must create their own
solutions to the challenges they face. Sacks has deep affinities with those
poets and scientists who are at home with contingency, with the fact that
our complex brains, and our complex lives, can come together in ways that
we make meaningful through narrative reconstruction but that could
never has been predicted in advance. He relates, tellingly, his attraction to
Gerald Edelmans neural Darwinism, picturing the brain as an orchestra
without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music. And he
begins the book with an epigram from Kierkegaard: Life must be lived
forwards but can only be understood backwards.
Ive met Oliver Sacks only briefly, and he contributed an essay on Freuds
early neurological work to a volume I edited. Over the years, though, I had
the sense of getting to know him while reading his intensely engaging
accounts of people who take in the world or react to it so very differently
than most. Like many of his readers, some months ago I responded with a
sense of real personal sadness when reading Sacks New York Times op-ed
announcing his bad luck of now facing a terminal cancer. I felt as if a
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