Oliver Sacks is beloved for his best-selling books that detail case studies of rare neurological disorders. Sacks created a niche when he combined his work as a neurologist with whimsical story telling. His dedication to and curiosity of the quirks of our brains provides an inside look into crevices of the human perspective. The more unusual of neurological abnormalities are little explored, and Sacks dives into the mind with the precision of a doctor.
Sacks’ Personal Experience With The Unusual
The New York Times awarded him the title “The Poet Laurete of Medicine”, an apt description of Sacks knack for weaving true disease tales with the story of a novel, delightfully bringing readers into the unusual spaces our brains can go.
His personal charm shines through his work. He is not your doctor on a high throne, devoid of personal experience. Rather, honesty and vulnerability of his personal writing was found in his frequent features in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and his own novels, which tell of his own experiences with the abnormal. His frequent drug use, particularly his interested in hallucinogenic, is used to enlighten his understanding of the unusual. He writes of his own hallucinations which resulted from drugs or drug withdrawal.
Sacks Writing on Rare Neurological Disorders
To develop empathy, one must understand others more profoundly, and personal experience is pertinent for this. He has one book on his own experience with Prosopagnosia, a disease that causes the inability to recognize faces. Even his own reflection could be unrecognizable. He tells the story of this disease in his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”, and uses his personal tales. He uses case studies that show the strength of patients, who often overcome seemingly incurably life-altering situations to make circumstances livable. He covers a wide range of conditions across his books including Parkinson’s disease, Tourette syndrome, visual agnosia, autism, and more.
He has an uncanny knack for explaining his world with optimism and admiration, finding the gift in difference and extreme human experiences. For example, he writes autism “can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence.”
One feature of exploring the rare medical world is that it’s untapped need is full of potential. Sacks’ ability to meld the arts and sciences gave him a unique role in the field, becoming a foremost expert on non-fiction medical story-telling.
As a medical student, he realized his greatest questions, he wrote in the New Yorker, “By the time I qualified as a doctor, at the end of 1958, I knew I wanted to be a neurologist, to know how the brain embodied consciousness and self and to understand its amazing powers of perception, imagery, memory, and hallucination. A new orientation was entering neurology and psychiatry at that time.”
After a life of psychiatry and writing, he set up a non-profit the “Oliver Sacks Foundation” which promotes using real case studies to explore the brain, creating a non-fiction narrative with the human perspective of a narrative.
Sacks’ Final Work
One of his final publications was “Gratitude”, a series of essays he wrote upon learning of his imminent death due to a dormant cancer that had now incurably metacized in his liver. In Sacks’ typical fashion, he dives to it his emotions mathematically. He recones with what his life has achieved, what he wishes he had pursued and had not. He explores what he has achieved in his dedicated career and lifelong learning.
In this reflection, he writes, “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Oliver Sacks died at 82 after a well lived life.
