What Did Oliver Sacks Like to Read?
Oliver Sacks, Neurologist Who Wrote Virtually the Encephalon's Quirks, Dies at 82
Video
transcript
transcript
Dr. Oliver Sacks, Explorer of the Brain
Dr. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and best-selling author who explored the brain'south strangest pathways. His work touched Hollywood, theater, even opera, and his legacy lasts in the stories he told.
-
NA
Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brain's strangest pathways in acknowledged instance histories similar "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," using his patients' disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human being condition, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.
The crusade was cancer, said Kate Edgar, his longtime personal banana.
Dr. Sacks announced in Feb, in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver and that he was in the belatedly stages of terminal cancer.
As a medical doctor and a author, Dr. Sacks achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists. More than a 1000000 copies of his books are in print in the The states, his work was adapted for motion-picture show and phase, and he received about ten,000 letters a year. ("I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison," he once said.)
Dr. Sacks variously described his books and essays as example histories, pathographies, clinical tales or "neurological novels." His subjects included Madeleine J., a blind woman who perceived her hands just as useless "lumps of dough"; Jimmie Chiliad., a submarine radio operator whose amnesia stranded him for more than than iii decades in 1945; and Dr. P. — the man who mistook his wife for a hat — whose brain lost the ability to decipher what his eyes were seeing.
Describing his patients' struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette'due south or Asperger's to a general audience. Just he illuminated their characters as much equally their conditions; he humanized and demystified them.
In his emphasis on instance histories, Dr. Sacks modeled himself after a questing breed of 19th-century physicians, who well understood how footling they and their peers knew nearly the workings of the human animal and who saw medical science as a vast, largely uncharted wilderness to be tamed.
"I had ever liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer," Dr. Sacks wrote in "A Leg to Stand On" (1984), most his own experiences recovering from muscle surgery. "I had explored many strange, neuropsychological lands — the furthest Arctics and Tropics of neurological disorder."
His intellectual curiosity took him fifty-fifty further. On his website, Dr. Sacks maintained a fractional list of topics he had written about. It included aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins.
Image
"I am very tenacious, for better or worse," he wrote in "A Leg to Stand On." "If my attending is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a not bad strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional."
He was also a human of contradictions: aboveboard and guarded, gregarious and solitary, clinical and empathetic, scientific and poetic, British and nearly American. "In 1961, I declared my intention to become a United States citizen, which may have been a 18-carat intention, merely I never got round to it," he told The Guardian in 2005.
Finding Acclaim and Critics
Dr. Sacks first won widespread attention in 1973 for his book "Awakenings," about a grouping of patients with an atypical form of encephalitis at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. When Dr. Sacks started his clinical career there, in 1966, many of the patients had been catatonic, locked inside themselves for decades as a result of their "sleeping sickness."
Dr. Sacks gave them the drug Fifty-dopa, which was merely kickoff to be recognized as a treatment for like symptoms in patients with Parkinson's, then watched as they emerged into a world they did non recognize. Some responded better than others — both to the drug and to their changed circumstances — and Dr. Sacks used his book to explore the differences and celebrate his patients' limited rebirth.
"I dearest to discover potential in people who aren't thought to have any," he told People magazine in 1986.
His other books included the acknowledged "An Anthropologist on Mars" (1995), virtually autistic savants and other patients who managed to thrive with their disorders; "The Mind's Heart" (2010), about the means people compensate for brain injuries; and three books most specific neurological conditions: "Migraine" (1970), "The Island of the Colorblind" (1997) and "Seeing Voices" (1989), a look at language perception among the deafened. He as well wrote "Oaxaca Journal," a 2002 travelogue about a trip to Mexico with the American Fern Gild.
Dr. Sacks began his medical career as a researcher but gave upward early, conceding that he had neither the temperament nor the eye-paw coordination for it. "I lost samples," he told an interviewer in 2005. "I broke machines. Finally they said to me: 'Sacks, you lot're a menace. Go out. Go see patients. They affair less.' "
Still fifty-fifty after he left research for clinical practice, he retained his scientific curiosity and his intuition for asking big questions. Years before it became fashionable to written report the chemical and neurological foundations of the heed, for example, Dr. Sacks identified the need for such a field in "A Leg to Stand On," where he termed it "clinical ontology" or "existential neurology."
Epitome
Dr. Sacks linked himself to the Soviet founder of neuropsychology, A. R. Luria, whom he considered a mentor. The two never met, but they maintained a long correspondence, and in 1977, Dr. Sacks wrote Dr. Luria's obituary for The Times of London.
Dr. Sacks's accounts of neurological oddities found a wide popular audience and were adapted for Hollywood, the theater, even opera. Robin Williams portrayed a Sacks-like physician in the 1990 film version of "Awakenings," and the novelist Richard Powers based a primal character on him in his 2006 volume, "The Repeat Maker." The 2011 motion-picture show "The Music Never Stopped" was adapted from "The Last Hippie," 1 of the case studies collected in "An Anthropologist on Mars." An opera based on "The Human Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," with music past Michael Nyman and a libretto by Christopher Rawlence, had its premiere in London in 1986 and was staged at Lincoln Center in New York in 1988.
The Contained of London called Dr. Sacks "the presiding genius of neurological drama." Reviewers praised his empathy and his svelte prose. Scientists could exist dismissive, nonetheless, complaining that his clinical tales put also much emphasis on the tales and not plenty on the clinical. A London neuroscientist, Ray Dolan, told The Guardian in 2005: "Whether Dr. Sacks has provided any scientific insights into the neurological conditions he has written about in his numerous books is open to question. I have always felt uncomfortable about this side of this work, and especially the tendency for Dr. Sacks to exist an always-present dramatis persona."
In an otherwise laudatory review of "The Human being Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" in The New York Times Book Review, the neuropsychologist John C. Marshall took effect with what he saw as Dr. Sacks's faux-naïve presentation ("He would have us believe that an experienced neurologist could neglect to accept read annihilation nearly many of the standard syndromes"), and chosen his blend of medicine and philosophy "insightful, empathetic, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating."More damningly, the disability-rights activist Tom Shakespeare defendant Dr. Sacks of exploiting the people he wrote about, calling him "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career."
A skilled pianist, Dr. Sacks often wrote most the relationship between music and the listen, eventually devoting a whole book, "Musicophilia" (2007), to the subject. Dr. Sacks disagreed with the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker's view of music as "auditory cheesecake," and pointed to its ability to achieve dementia patients as evidence that music appreciation is hard-wired into the encephalon."I oasis't heard of a human being being who isn't musical, or who doesn't reply to music one way or another," he told an audience at Columbia University in 2006. "I think we are an essentially, profoundly musical species. And I don't know whether — for all I know, language piggybacked on music."
Referring to Nietzsche's claim that listening to Bizet had fabricated him a ameliorate philosopher, Dr. Sacks said, "I think Mozart makes me a meliorate neurologist."
Fatigued to Science
Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9, 1933, in London, the youngest of 4 sons of Samuel Sacks and the erstwhile Muriel Elsie Landau, who were both doctors. His male parent, in Dr. Sacks's words a "moderately Orthodox" Jew, read the Bible daily, and Dr. Sacks oftentimes demonstrated a spiritual impulse in his books. But in "Uncle Tungsten," his 2001 memoir well-nigh his childhood love of chemical science, he explained that the inflamed Zionist meetings his parents held before the war helped plough him away from organized religion.
In "Uncle Tungsten," Dr. Sacks described how growing up in a household of polymaths fostered his interest in scientific discipline.
Prototype
"The thousand and one questions I asked as a kid," he wrote, "were seldom met by impatient or peremptory answers, but careful ones which enthralled me (though they were often higher up my head). I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to investigate."
When World State of war Ii broke out, his parents sent Oliver and his brother Michael to a rural boarding school that Dr. Sacks described equally a sadistic travesty, rife with bullying and cruelty. "The horribleness of the school," he wrote in "Uncle Tungsten," "was made worse for well-nigh of us by the sense that we had been abased past our families, left to rot in this awful place."
4 years later, when he returned home, he immersed himself in the refuge of his basement chemistry lab and the "eternal arrangement" of the periodic table.
After receiving his medical degree from the Queen'southward College, Oxford, Dr. Sacks moved to America in the early 1960s for an internship at Mountain Zion Infirmary in San Francisco, and so did his residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He embraced the culture he found in California — befriending the poet Thom Gunn, inbound weight-lifting competitions and joining the Hells Angels on motorbike trips to the Grand Canyon, adventures he wrote about in his 2015 memoir, "On the Movement: A Life."
Image
In that book, he also discussed his sexual identity for the kickoff time, describing his adolescent realization that he was gay. After several early flings, he wrote, he settled into a period of celibacy that lasted 35 years earlier he found love late in life. He is survived by his partner of six years, the writer Bill Hayes. Dr. Sacks moved to New York in 1965 for a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and, a year afterward, began the clinical work at Beth Abraham that led to "Awakenings." Over the years, he received many awards, including honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American University of Arts and Letters and the Purple College of Physicians. In 2008, he was named a Commander of the British Empire. In 1974, Dr. Sacks tore his left quadriceps while running from a bull on a Norwegian mountaintop, an injury he wrote nearly in "A Leg to Stand On." In that volume, he recalled an aunt visiting him in the hospital and telling him: "You lot've always been a rover. There are rovers, and there are settlers, just yous're definitely a rover. You lot seem to have 1 strange adventure after another. I wonder if you will e'er discover your destination."
A prolific journal-keeper, Dr. Sacks compiled more 600 notebooks. He published his essays in medical journals and magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books besides equally pocket-sized literary magazines like Antaeus, and he often revised them to add together new information fifty-fifty after they had already appeared in volume form. "Ah, Oliver!" he one time quoted an exasperated publisher equally saying. "You lot'd do anything for a footnote!"
For years, Dr. Sacks lived on Metropolis Island in the Bronx, where he liked to take long swims around it. More recently, he lived in Greenwich Village. Just he remained ambivalent about being chosen a New Yorker.
"I rather like the words 'resident conflicting,' " he told The Guardian. "It'southward how I experience. I'1000 a sympathetic, resident, sort of visiting alien."
Dr. Sacks preferred to exist an conflicting in New York rather than in California, he told The Calgary Herald. "Living in that location was too easy and as well sugariness," he said. "I needed ugly and violent, ferocious and challenging. ... At that place is a tremendous richness of life hither, Tourette'south visibly nowadays on the streets."
Remembered every bit a 'Witness'
Dr. Sacks remained active well into his later years. In 2007, at 74, he severed his 42-year human relationship with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to accept an interdisciplinary instruction position at Columbia. In 2012, he returned to the New York University School of Medicine as a professor of neurology. (He had had an offshoot position there for a couple of years in the 1990s, working more often than not with its Tourette's clinic.) And despite the enormous success of his books, he never gave up his unglamorous medical exercise — partly, no doubt, considering information technology provided him with material, just likewise considering he genuinely loved working with patients.
In 1989, interviewing him for "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," Joanna Simon asked Dr. Sacks how he would like to be remembered in 100 years.
"I would like it to exist thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others have told me," he said, "that I've tried to imagine what it was like for them, and that I tried to convey this.
"And, to use a biblical term," he added, "diameter witness."
He also bore witness to his own dwindling life, writing reflective essays even in his last days. On Aug. x, his assistant, Ms. Edgar, who described herself every bit his "collaborator, friend, researcher and editor" as well, wrote in an email: "He is still writing with great clarity. We are pretty sure he will go with fountain pen in hand."
Several days subsequently, a valedictory essay titled "Sabbath" appeared in The Times. In it, Dr. Sacks considered the importance of the Sabbath in human culture and concluded:
"And now, weak, short of jiff, my once-business firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant past living a expert and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of residuum, the 7th day of the week, and perchance the seventh day of one's life as well, when 1 can experience that i's work is washed, and one may, in adept conscience, rest."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/science/oliver-sacks-dies-at-82-neurologist-and-author-explored-the-brains-quirks.html
0 Response to "What Did Oliver Sacks Like to Read?"
Enregistrer un commentaire