Dr. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Challenged Life
Most young researchers and science fiends can trace the moment their scientific curiosity was sparked back to their childhood. For some, it was a field trip to the natural science museum, for others a role model that infected them with a sense of wonder about the world. For many, the prolific author-neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks became that inspiration. His career gave the world empathetic insight into brain disorders, inspiring art in the form of film, opera, and likely careers in medicine and neuroscience. Famous for his clinical tales that explored the inner workings of our nervous system, like The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Dr. Sacks revolutionized the medical field, standing at the intersection between neuropsychiatry and storytelling. His ability to combine fact and fable was made more remarkable by his sense of empathy and respect towards his patients. They were complex individuals, whose humanity was worth more than a medical diagnosis. Outside his excellent career, Dr. Sacks himself was a complex person, who continually pushed the boundaries of life.
Primarily, Dr. Sacks was driven by a passion for and fascination of music, going as far as considering it fundamental to humanity. As a casual musician himself, he was a firm believer in music’s ability to heal, hurt and haunt us. The power of music was highlighted in 2007 in his book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain”, where music was shown to deeply affect everyone, from the everyday man, to the hypermusical and the tonally deaf (known as amusia). His love for music also inspired his medical practise. With research demonstrating that music occupies more area of the brain than language, Dr. Sacks took advantage of music as a therapeutic tool for Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s patients, producing many accounts of patients “coming alive”. Despite extensive research, even Sacks couldn’t uncover the true power of music. With his musings that humans are hard-wired for music, he became a representative figure between medicine and art.
Although comfortable in a clinical setting, the doctor reported in interviews severe shyness and social discomfort. This was attributed to a lifelong difficulty in recognising faces, an ailment known prosopagnosia (or face blindness) that afflicted Sacks his whole life. In childhood, he relied on remembering classmates through notable features, such as heavy eyebrows or red hair. Although Sacks reported a moderate level of prosopagnosia, he goes on to describe his inability to recognise his own psychiatrist when meeting in a different setting, despite having been seeing him twice a week for several years. On some occasions, his prosopagnosia even extended to himself, apologising for bumping into a “large, bearded man”, only to realise it was himself in the mirror. Going hand in hand with prosopagnosia, Sacks also suffered from topographical agnosia, leaving him with difficulties in recognising places. He reported walking around for two hours in the rain unable to find his way home, despite having walked past it three times. Predictably, Sacks took to writing to process his experience and researched what happens in the brains of those with prosopagnosia, as well as those on the other end of the spectrum, labelled “super-recognizers”.
However, Sack’s fascination with the mystery of the mind was not limited to boundaries of disease. In a 2012 book, “Hallucinations”, Sacks questioned how hallucinations can arise and challenged the stigma around the word by showing they “don’t wholly belong to the insane”. Sacks also recalls personal transcendent experience with recreational drug use over the course of his life, including marijuana, LSD and medical-grade drugs. These mind-alerting episodes allowed him to explore certain features and structures of the brain, including his own migraines. He also believed that the drugs and self-induced hallucinations sensitised him to the experience of his patients with similar symptoms. Over time, Sacks sought satisfaction in drugs and became addicted to amphetamines as “a recourse for a lonely and isolated person”. An epiphany about the destructiveness of his addiction in 1966 led Sacks to a breakthrough of self-perception, therapy and ultimately recovery. A major catalyst for recovery was the joy he found in recording patient experiences through writing. Dr. Sacks’ recovery narrative demonstrated that understanding addiction and recovery requires discovery of a more meaningful experience.
A more serious health problem presented itself in 2006, when he was treated for ocular melanoma (cancer of the eye), leaving him with a blind eye. In later years, his experience inspired the book “The Mind’s Eye”, exploring neurological disorders affecting vision and his own experience of partially losing sight. The cancer eventually returned to his liver, but it wasn’t until 2015 that Sacks announced to the world his battle with the terminal cancer in a New York op-ed. His musings on life were revealed in final essays published in The Times, where his focus on the human condition only intensified: “And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself.” His time to rest came at 82 years old, hopefully with a feeling of having lived a good and worthwhile life. With his physical ailments and traumatic childhood, Sacks found solace in science. Not in schools and textbooks, but in laboratories, gardens and conversations with patients. Sacks took difficult life experiences and transformed them into inspirational and meaningful art, using them a springboard to uncover the fringes of the human experience.
The same year, Sacks publicly came out as gay, describing 35 years of celibacy and loneliness. Unaccepting parents, severe shyness and health issues left him unable to form intimate relationships for most of his life. He found love late in life, with writer and fellow history buff Bill Hayer. As an Englishman living in the US for over 50 years as a self-proclaimed “resident alien”, he reports the advantage of looking with detachment and sympathy, at the cost of no sense of belonging or identification. But his incessant desire for life beyond the ordinary, in combination with an intense curiosity and a life of solitude, certainly contributed to his ability to understand and sympathize with patients.
In contrast to the formulaic method of studying disease characteristics across a population, Sacks opted to shed light on the condition by observing the individual. Dr. Sacks was a firm believer in representing patients’ humanity, not just the mechanics of their disease. A sentiment expressed throughout all his bodies of work, but best said in his book Awakenings: “In present day medicine, by contrast, there is an almost exclusively technical or mechanical emphasis, which has led to immense advances, but also to intellectual regression, and a lack of proper attention to the full needs and feelings of patients”. His tone showed familiarity with the alienation and suffering felt by most of his patients.
Sacks’ works of nonfiction achieved a level of recognition that few scientists have been able to achieve. Dr. Sacks successfully challenged the stereotypical image of an overly-intellectual scientist removed from human suffering – the aim is to understand the person first, to understand the disease second. As a recent neuroscience graduate, his stories taught me more about empathy than any textbook ever could. Much like the people he described in his case studies, Dr. Sacks was multifaceted, full of oddities, quirks and obsessions. He was a man of contradictions - clinical and compassionate, scientific and poetic, a clinician and a patient. He embodied many of the inner struggles that young scientists following in his footsteps will face too. The candid way he spoke about the struggles of the human condition, not just the physical, brought me comfort. I think it’s only fitting that his humanity is also celebrated.