The Good Doctor’s Autobiography

Robert Frost thought that the key to understanding someone’s character and personality was to see how that person views him or herself. An autobiography will usually tell us something of the sort, or at least give some indication of how the writer would like to be seen, in the past and the present. It was with such thoughts in mind that I picked up Dr. Sacks’s account of his more than eight decades on this earth. Years of including his work in my English department-sponsored course in “Literature and Medicine” had given me confidence that I already knew what I needed to about Oliver Sacks (1933–2015). It turned out that I was wrong.

Right away I should have been alerted by the dust jacket that something was up: the picture on the front cover of a fairly youthful Oliver sitting astride a motorcycle is balanced on the back flap by a picture of a much older man sitting outside before natural rock formations and writing in a notebook that rests on his knee. Thus we have the indications of Sacks’s two passions—cycling and writing. For more pictures taken during his full life—including some of Dr. Sacks the medical practitioner at work—consult the twenty-four slick-paper pages inserted in the center of the book.

I had been teaching my course in “Literature and Medicine” for several years when Oliver Sacks published The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Immediately I decided that my students should read it. Organized around the sociologist Talcott Parsons’s idea that medical practitioners were trained to become “affectively neutral” in the practice of their art and science, my reading list was not lacking in writers who wrote about sickness and physicians. Good modern writing by physicians that met the requirements of the course, however, was harder to come by. Sacks’s work met my requirements beautifully. Presented as case histories, his accounts read like short stories. In fact I soon realized that they indeed were stories, organized along narrative lines, starting out with a description of a patient’s ailment or disability, followed by a review of the known research on prior cases and a detailed account of Dr. Sacks’s patient’s particular case, and concluding with the knowledge the good doctor derived from his contemplation of the case. That moral invariably involved the discovery that something “good” had come to the afflicted individual through or because of the affliction itself: something that might be called a compensation. Sacks’s “subjects,” he discovered, “had found or created unexpected adaptations to their disorders; all had compensating gifts of different sorts.”

In fact, as Stephen Jay Gould said to him, “In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensation that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature.” To my delight I find from On the Move that Dr. Sacks was in full agreement with Gould all along. Indeed, when we think about it, we cannot help but see that this conviction is manifest in all his stories and his books, from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to Awakenings, from An Anthropologist on Mars to Seeing Voices.

Sacks tells us that he wrote all the time, filling hundreds of notebooks over the years, and that storytelling was his métier, his passion. At the start of his career he quickly washed out as a medical researcher. He wrote somewhat apologetically to his family (his father, mother, and two of his brothers were practicing physicians), “I am probably too temperamental, too indolent, too clumsy, even too dishonest to make a good research worker. The only things I really enjoy are talking … reading and writing.” Adhering to his own explanation for his career change, he quickly settled in as a clinician, with patients to visit in various institutions. He was obviously a good listener and one who valued what patients...