Happy Birthday Oliver Sacks

It's the birthday of neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, born in London in 1933. He's been called the poet laureate of medicine because he turns case studies of patients with neurological conditions into eloquent narratives. He was even mentored, as a young writer, by poets W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn. "They taught me to look at disease, disorder, and suffering in broader human terms, and not just in narrow clinical or physiological terms. To look at predicaments, plights, and situations — not just diseases," he said in a 2010 interview with science journalist Steve Silberman.

He's best known for Awakenings (1973), about a group of people stricken with "sleeping sickness," whom he revives with a drug intended for Parkinson's disease; and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), a collection of essays about people with bizarre brain disorders. He published his 10th book last year, called The Mind's Eye (2010), about vision and the brain. This, of all his books, is the most autobiographical. He wrote it after developing ocular cancer, which left him blind in one eye, and he devoted one chapter to his experience. He says that his brain "fills in" the blind spot with images and patterns, and sometimes even a realistic image of what's really there. "I was washing my hands, and then for some reason I closed my left eye, and I continued to see the wash basin, the commode next to it, and the mirror very, very clearly — so clearly, in fact, that my first thought was that the dressing over the right eye must be transparent. But it was a huge, thick, opaque dressing." He also writes about his "face blindness": the inability to recognize faces, including, sometimes, his own. "My attention goes to the rest of you — your voice, shirts, your pants," he told The New Yorker. "I am not very good at describing faces. You have the usual number of features." The Writer's Almanac

https://www.oliversacks.com/