Awakenings author had a unique literary gift, showing ‘potential of an intense inner life and individuality even in people who seem so very damaged’
The world will be a far, far poorer place without regular reports from the distant reaches of the land of mind and brain by the great neurologist Oliver Sacks. He had a unique literary gift. A clinician of compassion, he could also – in a deft, often passionate portrait – familiarise us with human peculiarities and the kinds of talents and courage they can give rise to.
Where Balzac’s Human Comedy is filled with insights into the struggles of the youth from the provinces in the corrupt capital, or of the far too pleasure-loving young poet, Sacks’s human comedy presents the tragic case of the musician Dr P who develops visual agnosia and fails to recognise ordinary objects, in the process mistaking his wife for a hat; or the “extinct volcanoes” of Awakenings, people frozen by the encephalitis epidemic of the 1920s and only woken in 1969 by Sacks’s administration of the drug L-Dopa; or the tics and passions of a Tourette’s syndrome patient; or the world of the deaf who can “see” voices; or the autistic boy who is a draftsman of genius. Sacks’s clinical tales are the quintessential literature for our medicalised times.
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