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Paradoxes from Medical Science: Oliver Sacks

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

Reading more recent authors writing on biology and medicine, like Siddhartha Mukherjee, Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi, I found one of the many that I had left out: Oliver Sacks. This post is a review of a book by him that I just read, An Anthropologist on Mars (1995).


Brief Biography


Sacks was born in London in 1933, trained as a doctor at Oxford, did his internship and residency in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, and worked as a neurologist at several institutions in the United States, including Columbia and NYU.


He came from a family with a large number of professionals including a Nobel laureate, initially indulged in bodybuilding and motorcycling, was friends with literati like the poets W. H. Auden and Thom Gunn, was a homosexual and never married, and passed away in New York City in 2015 from cancer.


Sacks received: among other things, a membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, criticism for basing a literary career on his patients' histories, and many honorary doctorates.


The book


The book has seven chapters, each based on a patient who has a certain affliction. But this affliction, although it diminishes what we would call normal functioning, brings out other abilities. Hence the tales in the book are labeled as paradoxical.


i) The first story is about a painter who becomes colorblind as the result of a concussion acquired from a car accident. This is intriguing because colorblindness is usually genetic - I'm red-green colorblind - and rarely caused by damage to the brain.


Initially, the patient saw daylight as fog, found color TV unpleasant to watch, and was depressed by looking at rainbows. But over time, he became a superb painter of black and white art, and developed nocturnal abilities superior to most humans - he could read car plates from four block away at night.


ii) The second story is about a young hippie who had suffered from amnesia due to a large but otherwise benign tumor in his brain, even after it had been removed surgically.


However, Sacks discovered in the patient a passion for rock-and-roll bands of the sixties. He could recall the programs of concerts he had gone to, picked up many new songs and sang them with depth and feeling, and displayed a prodigious memory for remembering hundreds of limericks from the radio and TV that practically played nonstop in his ward.


iii) The third story is about a patient of Tourette's syndrome, which caused him to make involuntary movements and sounds. Remarkably, this did not stop him from having a family; more amazingly, flying his own plane; and perhaps most amazingly, working as a surgeon.


iv) The fourth story is about a man who became blind in childhood. Nonetheless, he grew up to lead a normal life, with a job, a house, hobbies and romantic relationships, etc. Eventually, he got married to childhood friend. She convinced him to undergo an operation that partially restored his eyesight.


Sacks' article is about how the ability to see disoriented the patient, who continued to have, and want to revert to, the behavior of a blind person. An example: he could not recognize some objects when he looked at them; but he recognized them immediately when he touched them.


v) The fifth story is about an immigrant to the United States who was overcome by nostalgia about his native village in Italy. That's the only topic he could think or talk about.


Sacks describes how, hardly having drawn or painted before, the immigrant - like Proust - turned his nostalgia into art, painting countless scenes from his native village with photographic recall, eventually exhibiting at the San Francisco Exploratorium and elsewhere.

vi) The sixth story is about an autistic person. As happens in this condition, he had difficulties relating to other human beings. As also happens in some cases - some autistic persons are fantastic mathematical calculators, others musical prodigies - he had great cognitive abilities.


Sacks describes how the person was an artistic savant, specializing in the drawing of buildings with astounding accuracy, eventually acquiring a literary agent, and appearing in a program on BBC.


vii) The last story is about another autistic person, who also has trouble relating to human beings, but is a world expert on animal behavior, practicing her expertise at the Colorado State University.


Sacks is a good narrator, with an engaging literary style. He includes historical, medical, artistic and literary perspectives in his writing. At some places I felt a little overwhelmed by the technical medical detail. The next Oliver Sacks book on my shelf that I intend to read: Musicophilia (2007).

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