«L’atto di scrivere, quando va bene, mi dà un piacere, una gioia, che non somiglia a nessun’altra. Mi porta in un altrove che mi assorbe interamente facendomi dimenticare tutto, ansie, preoccupazioni e persino il passare del tempo. In quel raro, paradisiaco stato della mente arrivo a scrivere senza sosta fino a che non riesco più a vedere il foglio. E solo allora scopro che è scesa la sera…»


 

Most people don’t read books about neurology and don’t really know what it is, but a book with the title The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat would certainly attract most people’s attention!
Published in 1985, it was not Oliver Sacks’s first book – he wrote many over his long career – but it brought him a huge number of readers and made him a household name.
Twelve years before, he had written a book called Awakenings. From the title, it might be difficult to guess what it is about. Let’s look at the actual word, from the verb ‘to awake’. Sacks investigated a number of his patients who had remained for decades in a coma-like state, which was neither sleeping nor waking, as a result of severe encephalitis. Most were speechless, many could hardly move. He treated them with the then-experimental drug called levodopa and most of them ‘woke up’. Did this waking phase last? Read the book, look at the striking and sometimes disturbing photographs, and you will find out. This account of Sacks’s experiments was so successful that it was made into a film in 1990 with Robin Williams playing the famous neurologist.
Towards the end of his life, Sacks published Hallucinations, in which he maintained that hallucinatory experiences are not confined to the insane. You and I can have them too, he said, because of a variety of reasons, including physical illness or injury. One case concerns a marathon runner who, in his hallucination, was abducted by aliens. Sacks said that hallucinations are “an essential part of the human condition”. However, don’t confuse them with daydreams; they are much more serious!
Oliver Sacks was born in London and grew up in an intensely intellectual atmosphere. His mother was one of the first female surgeons to practise in England and his father was a general practitioner. He studied Medicine at Oxford University and then went to Canada. In 1965 he moved to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. Very soon he was working with the survivors of a 1920s encephalitis epidemic, commonly called the ‘sleepy sickness’ (not to be confused with the African disease, ‘sleeping sickness’), and this experience became the basis for Awakenings.
Oliver Sacks’s greatest achievement is probably in bringing an understanding of neurology to the general public and making people more compassionate in the face of prejudice against those suffering from various forms of mental illness. His writing style is fluent and sometimes even humorous, yet always respectful with regard to the (usually anonymous) patients he describes. Like every great writer, he has been praised as well as criticised. The British critic Tom Shakespeare, in a review of Sacks’s 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars, called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”. Was he? Read him and make up your own mind!