A Leg to Stand On

A Leg to Stand On
by Oliver Sacks
Article in Brainpickings

It’s the birthday of the man the New York Times called “the poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (books by this author), born in London (1933). Sacks’s mother was one of England’s first female surgeons; his father was a general practitioner. His parents were not demonstrative and treated their children like colleagues: Sacks was dissecting human tissue with his mother by the age of 11. As a teenager, he became fascinated with chemistry, a subject he later explored in his memoir, Uncle Tungsten (2001), the first draft of which topped out at more than 2 million words.

Sacks fled England for Canada in 1960, sending his parents a one-word telegram, “Staying.” In California, he dabbled in drugs, developed a taste for motorcycles, and befriended the poet Thom Gunn. Sacks cleaned up his act and by 1965 was in New York, failing miserably as a research scientist. Once, he forgot to tie his lab notebook tightly enough to his motorcycle rack and his papers blew over the Cross Bronx Expressway. His supervisors said: “Sacks, you are a menace in the lab. Why don’t you go and see patients — you’ll do less harm.”

In a dilapidated Bronx hospital, Sacks found his calling. “When I wandered in there, on my first day, I saw these frozen, transfixed people in the corridors. I had never seen anything like that. I thought, ‘These are my people.’” His patients were victims of encephalitis lethargica, or “sleeping sickness,” which had swept the world in the early 20th century. Sacks turned his findings into a best-selling book, Awakenings, blending the role of physician and writer, a stance that proved popular with readers, but not with the medical establishment, which questioned the quality of his science.

Sacks’s books have raised awareness of brain disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome and autism and are, at root, about people who have suffered loss to their identities. About using medicine as storytelling, Sacks said: “My patients come to me with stories. They have predicaments. They have plights. They come searching for ways of dealing with these things. There is something dramatic in all this.”

-Writer's Almanac