Oliver Sacks, the revered neurologist and writer, died of cancer in New York City today. He was 82. In an essay in The New York Times an essay by Sacks in February revealing that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver. The London-born academic, whose book Awakenings inspired the film of the same name, wrote:
“A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out – a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.”
Awakenings was based on his work with patients treated with a drug that woke them up after years in a catatonic state. The 1990 film version, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture.
As tributes are being paid, Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times writer, praised him;
“[He] was a polymath and an ardent humanist, and whether he was writing about his patients, or his love of chemistry or the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life – the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human imagination.”
Lisa Appignanesi wrote in The Guardian of Sacks’s ability to transform his subjects into grand characters.
“For all their lacks and losses, or what the medics call ‘deficits’, Sacks’s subjects have a capacious 19th-century humanity. No mere objects of hasty clinical notes, or articles in professional journals, his “patients” are transformed by his interest, sympathetic gaze and ability to convey optimism in tragedy into grand characters who can transcend their conditions. They emerge as the very types of our neuroscientific age.”
In his memoir, Uncle Tungsten, he wrote about his early boyhood. He was sent away from London during the wartime bombing and bullied at boarding school. Growing up, he witnessed his schizophrenic brother’s treatment with drugs and his torment. His also memoirs reveal that his mother said when she learned of his homosexuality:
“I wish you had never been born.”
He writes of a few love affairs, his road trips and being obsessed with bodybuilding. Sacks had nearly 1,000 journals and more letters and clinical notes upon which to draw for his autobiography.
After he revealed that he had terminal cancer, Sacks quoted one of his favourite philosophers, David Hume. When he discovered was terminally ill at 65, Hume wrote:
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.
I am … a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”
If there’s a “good way” to go, this must be it.
(via The Guardian)
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