Astronomer of the mind: Oliver Sacks's Awakenings

• Published in: The Lancet (British edition) 2024-06, Vol.403 (10443), p.2478-2479
• Main Author: Francis, Gavin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astronomy - history; Bags; Careers; History, 19th Century; History, 20th Century; Humans; Medicine; Patients; Reconciliation; Sacks, Oliver W; Science
• ISSN: 0140-6736; 1474-547X; 1474-547X
• DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01130-9

“Beth Abraham was in fact a treasure house of remarkable patients, and I became their curator”, he told his biographer, Lawrence Weschler, adding that like his hero British neurologist Hughlings Jackson of Queen Square, “I feel that my greatest interest resides in the back wards of asylums.” Awakenings did not sell well; Sacks's commercial success had to wait for his 1985 essay collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (the title suggested by Sacks's then editor at the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers), and that very success led to opprobrium. In one passage towards the book's conclusion, a passage that references Leibnitz and Donne (again), but also Dante Alighieri and Sigmund Freud, Sacks reminds us, with Hippocrates, that life is short but learning the art of medicine is long, “that Eros is the oldest and strongest of the gods; that love is the alpha and omega of being; and that the work of healing, of rendering whole, is first and last, the business of love”. On rereading Sacks's books it is my impression that medicine ultimately granted him reconciliation of his two natures—the pursuit of science and of art—because he came to realise that they were manifestations of the same impulse: to know the world in all its plurality.