A storyteller of the human experience

Instead of writing for this blog yesterday I watched the documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. Sacks was a neurologist who wrote fascinating books on some of the cases he encountered. I’ve read at least one of his books, Musicophilia, and enjoyed it. I’ve also heard him on the podcast Radiolab. It was through the podcast I learned Sacks was gay. After getting a diagnosis of liver cancer in early 2015 he brought friends together for the purpose of narrating his life for them and the cameras. Later on other people were filmed describing him or their encounters with him. Sacks was born in 1934 grew up in a house north of London. He was the youngest of four boys. During WWII he and his brother Michael were evacuated to a boy’s school away from danger. It was a horrible experience and Michael became schizophrenic. To tune that out Oliver delved into science and became fascinated with elements and minerals. He studied medicine in college. When he came out his mother didn’t take it well. He knew it was not safe to be gay in England in the 1950s. He was angry at the world. In 1960 he left for San Francisco. His first relationship didn’t go well and he vowed to remain single, though he had another brief relationship at age 40. He couldn't find his purpose in life. He did lots of drugs and did reckless things. Yet he was always deeply empathic and generous with patients. He moved to New York and started psychoanalysis in 1966 and left drugs behind. His work in neurology, the way the brain worked and how it sometimes didn’t work, became fascinating and he felt he no longer needed drugs. One of his early jobs was working in the mental ward of a hospital where he encountered nearly comatose patients. His work with them, bringing them out of their comatose state, alas temporarily, became the subject of his book Awakenings. It was dismissed by other neurologists. That lack of recognition made him reckless again. He had an accident with a bull in Norway which damaged his leg. For a while he couldn’t feel it. That prompted the book A Leg to Stand On. It was difficult to write because he feared it would be rejected by the medical community again. That stifled his writing. He kept careful notes of his cases. He was able to write up the case histories as fascinating stories such as the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He was a storyteller of the human experience, trying to to understand what other people’s lives were like. He undermined current perceptions of autism & Tourette's syndrome. His fellow neurologists complained he wasn’t doing science. Science required creating a hypothesis and testing it. All he did was observe. One colleague told us, if one must test a hypothesis what is the Hubble Telescope doing? It only observes. A movie version of Awakenings was released in 1990. Sacks was played by Robin Williams. I saw that movie and enjoyed it. With that movie his medical colleagues paid attention to him. He was asked to speak and was given honorary awards. His stories of how the mind worked connected with the public. His many books sold well. Consciousness was now a big field of study. Sacks wondered how could his work fit with this research. He saw his job to talk to the scientists about his observations. The book Musicophilia was one of several books that came out of their conversations. He found love in his late 70s. He could finally attend a gay bar. He died six months after his diagnosis at age 81. Up to the end he was still writing.