The craft and art of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks is dying of malignant melanoma with metastases in his liver. He described his predicament in a lyrical Op-Ed essay in the New York Times in February 2015.  He is English by birth and education. After graduating in medicine from Oxford and the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London and the obligatory internship in the UK, he set off for North America, footloose and fancy free for a while, living a roving, restless life with which I strongly identify. He came to rest eventually in San Francisco where he gravitated into neurology. This proved to be his intellectual and spiritual home. He continued exploring this calling after he moved across the continent to New York where he came to rest more or less permanently, associated initially with Beth Abraham, a chronic neurological hospital affiliated with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. I think it was during this period that I first met him, in the early 1970s during a site visit for the NIH Epidemiology and Disease Control Study Section. It was a transient meeting, as was another a few years later during my sabbatical year at Mount Sinai Medical College. Like Oliver Sacks, I have poor facial recognition ability: all I can recollect is a large man with great charisma (not enough, however, to persuade the hard-nosed Study Section to award high priority to an application for research funds).  By then his award-winning book, Awakenings, had been published in the UK but perhaps not yet in USA and he had not yet established his reputation as the greatest medical writer of his time. Awakenings is about the dramatic improvement of vegetable-like victims of post-encephalitic Parkinson's disease when given l-dopa; it was later made into a very good movie starring Robin Williams as Oliver Sacks. I have read every one of Oliver Sacks's books - mostly personal accounts of patients with bizarre neurological or neuropsychiatric aberrations. Most have been best sellers and several, e.g. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and his essays on the autistic savant Temple Grandin (An Anthropologist on Mars) who transformed slaughterhouse practice in USA, have passed into our culture. I think Oliver Sacks would be a more worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature than some recent recipients. Not only is he a master of English prose; he is a great humanist, with profound understanding and insight into the human condition.

Now I am reading his final book, a memoir, On the Move. He writes more openly than hitherto about his homosexuality, and describes frankly and objectively his adventures and misadventures with illicit drugs. His accounts of weekend high speed travels on his motor-bike from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon and back almost make my flesh creep. I hardly know him, but regard him as an old friend because I know him so well through his brilliant essays. I am very glad he was spared an untimely death despite his self-destructive behaviour.