Oliver Sacks’ Collected Letters Offer a Insight into the Neurologist’s Mind

There are those who know how to write and those who don’t. not to write. Oliver Sacks belonged to the latter category. A neurologist by training, Sacks was insatiably curious and wrote incessantly and happily about anything that caught his interest, which was to say just about everything. Readers get a new glimpse into his mind this year, nearly a decade after his death, thanks to a new collection of the doctor’s letters compiled and annotated by his longtime editor, Kate Edgar.

To read these letters is to be reminded of the deeply felt humanism and exuberance that Sacks brought to his prose: they include condolences, responses to fans, and lengthy scholarly reflections that read like essays for his books. There is not the slightest hint of cynicism or pessimism here, only the pleasure of sharing ideas and enthusiasms with friends, family, colleagues and fans. Sacks did his best to respond to every letter that found him, sometimes at great length.

Details of Sacks’ life story were laid out by the author in two autobiographies, 2001’s “Uncle Tungsten” and 2015’s “On The Move” – the latter, the letters reveal, was rushed in order to that Sacks, who was terminally ill with melanoma, could see it published. The letters can be read as an autobiography written in real time, as they describe the play of his mind throughout his life. They function as a kind of biography of Sacks’s inner life and the happy and rigorous character of his thought.

The son of two doctors, Sacks began life as if he were a young adult shot out of a cannon. After earning his medical degree in England, he bought a motorcycle and traveled across Canada and the United States, gathering adventures and friends along the way. After studying neurology at UCLA, Sacks landed in New York in the early 1960s, seeing patients at Beth Abraham Hospital and the Bronx Psychiatric Center before beginning his work in the headache unit from Albert Einstein College in the Bronx.

The mind-body problem and how the diseased brain functions independently of human action became Sacks’ star, the subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career. He meets survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic, who are living statuary, unable to move or communicate, and he has ideas for treating these patients.

As the letters reveal, Sacks’ hands-on approach of spending a lot of time with his patients and listening to those who could communicate placed him on the margins of scientific thought. He wrote to his parents that when his bosses questioned his methods, “there is a risk that a person of negligible formal status like me will find himself caught between two Leviathans.”

Undaunted, Sacks persevered, and some of the in-depth interviews he conducted with people suffering from severe headaches became the material for his first book, “Migraine.” This approach constituted a methodological apostasy among many headache researchers. He wrote to a British doctor who had favorably reviewed the book: “A very eminent neurologist recently said to me: ‘Your book is fascinating, but of course it is irrelevant.’ »

Sacks’ hybrid approach, combining field research and journalism techniques, would make him the world’s most famous neurologist, even though medical journals repeatedly refused to publish him. When in 1972 a London publisher asked him to edit his book “Awakenings,” based on nine case studies of his patients with encephalitis lethargica, Sacks seems to have been delighted but wary. “Publishing such detailed information about living people could disturb them,” he writes.

“Awakenings” was published in 1973, and the book seriously launched Sacks’ career as a literary figure. WH Auden called the book a masterpiece and a relationship was formed. “Thank you very much for your magnanimous response to my book,” Sacks wrote to Auden in March 1973. “There is person whose favorable response could make me happier than yours.

Sacks continued his work as a doctor and author, one profession feeding into the other. When he compiled a series of essays on patients with unusual intellectual disabilities in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” Sacks entered a whole new realm of worldwide recognition, which he found at both satisfying and disconcerting. “There are certainly two sides to this matter of… being knownand suddenly finding myself the object of incessant attention and demand,” he wrote to his father, Samuel Sacks, in the spring of 1986. “I yearn passionately for peace and quiet – I receive at least fifty or sixty letters and telephone calls. calls per day. »

Letters from superstar Sacks around this time began to be addressed to Susan Sontag, Deepak Chopra, Thom Gunn and Jane Goodall. Sacks’ publishing royalties had made him wealthy, and yet he doggedly pursued new avenues of interest, testing hypotheses in his letters about Tourette syndrome and color perception with colleagues while producing essays and books with an almost graphomaniac fervor.

Even as he contemplated his own impending death, Sacks moved quickly. “I’m falling apart quickly and don’t know how long I can hope to maintain consciousness and coherence,” he wrote to editor Dan Frank in the summer of 2015, while also outlining his plan to “set up a modest (about $40,000) word) book’ of essays. Even on the brink of death, Sack was alive to the world.

Marc Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”