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“Sacks, a neurologist without university support for most of his career, was arguably the foremost neurologic belle-lettrist of his generation. Poignantly and meticulously he set down the case histories of 20 of his patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the North Bronx. These patients had post-encephalitic Parkinsonism brought on by von Economo’s encephalitis which raged worldwide in 1916 and 1917. The sense of wonder about the human neurologic condition is all too often dulled by the daily workflow of diagnosis and treatment. Oliver Sacks’ oeuvre is a powerful restorative for the fascination that starts us out in the practice of the field of applied human biology called, simply, ‘medicine.’” Read more...
The best books on Clinical Neuroscience
Frederick Lepore, Medical Scientist
“I must have first read this book in the early eighties, and found it – like a lot of Sacks’s writing – absolutely fascinating. Not just because of the philosophical and scientific perspectives that he is involved in, but because of his involuntary self-characterisation. I used some of Sacks’s modes and mannerisms quite shamelessly as one of the sources for my character Zack Busner, who is a repeat presence in my fictions.” Read more...
Will Self on Literary Influences
Will Self, Novelist
No list of physician writers would be complete without the man so often described as “the poet laureate of medicine.” In this 1973 book, one of his best known works—later adapted both as a play by Harold Pinter, and a Hollywood movie starring Robert De Niro—Sacks relates his efforts to bring sleeping sickness patients back to consciousness after decades in a catatonic stupor. Also unmissable from Sacks’ back catalogue are The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars
From our article Books like This is Going to Hurt
