Written: Meagan Olivier
Oliver Sacks was born in London, England in 1933 into a family of physicians and scientists. His mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner. From the ages of one to five he attended the hospital at which his parents worked. When he was 6 years old, his parents sent him and his brother to boarding school far away from the dangers of wartime in London. He still remembers that day. “You’ll be safe there,” said his parents. He hugged his parents and his favorite aunt who gave him a black radish (a favorite delicacy) as the train left Watford Junction.
At school, he learnt basic skills, took riding lessons, piano lessons, gardened, and built tree houses. He was often punished by the headmaster for small infractions, such as falling asleep in class. His parents sent sausages and salmon, but they never managed to come and visit. The first years at school might have been easier for Sacks if his parent would have visited however the bombings in London prevented that. Sacks often remembers being hungry, only managing to eat Swedes and mangel-wurzels (a giant vegetable usually fed to the cattle) every now and then.
Sacks never complained about his mistreatments because he understood how important his parents jobs were. One day, at school he planted two rows of radishes in the garden, he prayed to God and asked him to bless one and curse the other. When both rows grew and flourished, Sacks recalls "I regarded this as definitive disproof of the Deity."
A miserable Sacks was rescued by science, a world that was of order and elegant predictability. When he went back to London he started his long love affair with chemistry. As a teenager, he buried himself in books, wanting to learn everything that science had to offer.
In London he became friends with Jonathan Miller and Eric Korn both of which shared his love for science. One day they paid an unannounced visit to Sir Julian Huley, they wanted to speak to him about evolution. He received the three boys graciously. Says Sacks:
"I think the great man was both amused and impressed by such undersized, ink-stained and sort of grimy children."
There was never a question that Sacks would not follow his parents and his two older brothers’ foot steps and go into medicine. He earned his medical degree at Oxford university, and did his neurology residency in Los Angeles. Where he was remembered as the massive, bearded Englishman, whose shirt was often un-tucked and whose humanistic approach often led him to unorthodox tactics that led him to trouble. Such an example was the time during his residency, where he smuggled a woman dying from multiple sclerosis out of the hospital for a ride on his motorcycle.
After his residency, Sacks was set on having a research career. He got his first fellowship in New York, extracting myelin from earthworms. Unfortunately this ended prematurely when Sacks managed to lose the vial containing the precious material and dropped a hamburger in the centrifuge. Hissecond fellowship he lost because he had grown so attached to experimental chicken No. 4304 that he could not bear to kill it. After the hamburger incident and the chicken, the failed researcher was banished to the "lowly" world of clinical medicine, working with patients instead of test tubes and microscopes.
Yet it was there he made his greatest discovery with a patient named Beth Abraham who was one of the few that fell ill but survived the encephalitis lethargic epidemic. Furthermore in 1966 he discovered 80 other patients similar to Beth. However, all of these patients developed odd symptoms that eventually led them to becoming catatonic for many years. It was Sacks that "awakened" them by giving them a new "miracle" drug being pioneered in the treatment of Parkinson's disease known as L-dopa.
The effects of the drug were unpredictable, sending patients into a frenzy of tics and hallucinations, or it could suddenly cease working making them once again prisoners of their disease. Sacks was deeply moved by his patients such that he filled page after page in his notebook, determined to bring their story to his medical colleagues’ attentions.
He sent letters detailing his patient’s conditions but unfortunately they were either attacked or ignored. Nonetheless Sacks did not give up and wrote a scientific journal describing L-dopa' effects. This was later published into a book he called "Awakenings."
After this experience, Sacks started his collection of case histories; "The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "An Anthropologist on Mars". In both of these he describes in extreme detail neurological diseases such as Tourette ’s syndrome, autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease.
In the years to follow Sacks published more books about his patients. Since many of the stories are about incurable neurological disease, the force driving them is not the race for a remedy but rather the patient's struggle to maintain his or her identity in a world utterly changed by the neurotically disorder. In Sacks' case histories, the hero is not the doctor, or even medicine itself but the patients who learned to grow with the disorder. By mastering new skills, these patients became even more whole, more powerfully and much more individualistic than when they were "well". His books were also a great source of information to scientists who are looking for a cure. Hence it is understandable that he has received a number of awards for these books.
Sacks has set a legacy both in medicine and the arts for his work with patients suffering from neurological disorders. He is truly a compassionate man that has and continues to build a great dynasty. Currently at the age of 76 he resides in New York City, where he is professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University.
Bibliography:
Work
Sacks, Oliver. Oliver Sacks, M.D., Physician, Author, KPFdigital, Mar. 2010.
Goode., Erica E. Scribe of the Spirit: the Real Doctor behind the Film 'Awakenings,' Oliver Sacks HasSpent His Life Reporting from the Far Reachesof Human Experience. Electronic ProductsLogin. Jan.-Feb.2007. Web.
Figure
Sacks, Oliver. Oliver Sacks, M.D., Physician, Author, KPFdigital, Mar. 2010.
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