Oliver Sacks: The Brain Traveller

Give or take a century, organ transplants from one human to another are going to be history. Artificial hearts, lungs, kidneys will do better and last longer, every organ replaceable and serviceable. Except the brain. If medical science is coming out of its teens with other body parts, when it comes to the brain, it is a toddler. We don’t know what it is about the brain that gives us consciousness, why people get Alzheimer’s, how to cure schizophrenia or what triggers depression. The brain is just too complex to make sense of at present. The more we know about it, the more intriguing it gets, and, since we can’t cut open and look into healthy brains, much of our knowledge comes by studying damaged ones that come to doctors for help. Oliver Sacks, who passed away on 30 August, didn’t just appreciate the tragic irony of this, he passed it on to his readers.

Sacks started his career as a doctor—a neurologist—-and continued to be one despite the enormous acclaim after becoming a bestselling writer. He had the writer’s penchant for out-of-the-ordinary details, and in the field he was in, they were aplenty, wondrous and sad. It was his second book, Awakenings, in 1973, that made him his name as a writer. It was based on his own experience in the 1960s of using a drug called L Dopa to bring patients who had been comatose for decades following a disease called encephalitis lethargica back to life. And then, as the drug wore off, he watched helplessly as they slipped back into catatonia to never be revived again. The human story was always at the centre for Sacks. A profile on him by The Atlantic magazine in May noted, ‘Sacks sees himself in the tradition of Freud and of the Russian neurologist A. R. Luria, medical men who took upon themselves the depiction of the fullness of a patient’s life and not just the course of an illness. Their case studies are powerful narratives, and Sacks, too, wanted his clinical portraits to be recognized as literary achievements. When his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, praised Awakenings as a masterpiece, Sacks tells us he wept.’

His 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was a set of essays about people with different forms of brain damage, ranging from visual agnosia (the inability to recognise objects and so the title of the book) to autistic savants to people who didn’t find their body parts in order. A New York Times article on the book mentions that Sacks ‘sees the human condition like a philosopher-poet. The resultant mixture is insightful, compassionate, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating.’

For over four decades beginning in the 1970s, Sacks continued to write his clinical tales. His last two books on neurology were related to music and hallucinations. Early this year, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he penned down his response to the disease in a deeply inspiring New York Times article. For a man who had spent his life chronicling and describing incurable ailments and was himself on the verge of death, there was not a whiff of defeat in what he wrote. ‘It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.’ He looked back at life and found a whole where there were once disjointed parts but he was still not through with it. ‘On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.’ He remained busy. When he died, he left two finished articles ready for publication.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

•