Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1933: Oliver Sacks

(d. 2015) His family was as impressive as he: his father, a Lithuanian Jew, was a respected physician. His mother was among England’s first female surgeons. His large extended family included scientists, physicians, statesmen and a Nobel Laureate. He earned a BA in physiology and biology from Queen’s College, Oxford. After a disappointing experience in academic research, he spent a summer on a Israeli kibbutz and scuba diving in the Red Sea to consider his future. He determined that his future was in medicine, and returned to England to enter medical school. He was also determined to work with real patients in an actual hospital setting. As he wrote in his 2015 autobiography, On the Move: A Life:

My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine. Seeing patients, listening to them, trying to enter (or at least imagine) their experiences and predicaments, feeling concerned for them, taking responsibility for them, was quite new to me … It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves—questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.

Sacks moved to the U.S. in 1959 and studied psychiatry and neurology. He also experimented with recreational drugs. A book he read on migraines by a nineteenth-century physician while high on amphetamine led to an epiphany that would set the direction for the rest of his life: he would chronicle his observations of his patients’ neurological diseases and other oddities. He would be a tour guide of the mind. His books were inspired by nineteenth-century case histories, but with a decidedly twentieth-century eye for narrative details. His 1973 best-seller Awakenings explored the inner lives of of post-encephalitis patients who had survived an epidemic in the 1920s only to be locked in a catatonic state for the next fifty years. The inner lives only become accessible when Sacks administers the experimental drug L-Dopa, which brings about an “awakening” among his patients. The book was made into a successful film in 1990.

More books followed. If you haven’t read any of these, then you’re life is all the poorer for it: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) contains 24 essays exploring the altered perceptions of people whose mental impairments are sometimes insurmountable, yet those impairments often reveal a kind of richness that is easy to overlook. One essay, “The Dog Beneath the Skin,” talks about a 22-year-old medical student who, after a night of partying on amphetamines, cocaine, and PCP, wakes the next morning to find that he now has an exceptionally heightened sense of smell. Sacks would later reveal that he was that medical student.

And more: Seeing Voices (1989) dived into the world of the deaf, with a particularly fascinating chapter of how sign language evolved to convey tenses and spatial relationships that are impossible to translate into spoken languages. An Anthropologist from Mars (1995) presents people living with autism, Tourette’s syndrome and amnesia. One essay profiled a painter who was profoundly color blind, another presented a man who found the experience of recovering his eyesight after surgery to be deeply disturbing. For The Island of the Colorblind (1997), he goes to Guam and Micronesia, where congenital colorblindness and severe sensitivity to light is common. Musicophilia (2008) explores the intersection of music and neurology among children with Williams syndrome who are “hypermusical” from birth, and people for whom a symphony sounds like nothing more than “the clattering of pots and pans.” In The Mind’s Eye (2010), he explores how we see and what we see, even when we can no longer see. There’s the concert pianist who can see but can’t recognize what she sees, another who can’t see in three dimensions, and a writer who keeps writing even though a stroke destroyed his ability to read. And in Hallucinations (2012), he writes about patients (and himself) who experienced mind-altering states to explore what those experiences tell us about the brain’s structure and function.

As you can see, Sacks made several autobiographical appearances in his essays. He also wrote four fully autobiographical books. In A Leg To Stand On (1998), he talks about his recovery from a severe leg injury inflicted by a bull on a Norwegian mountaintop. During his recover, he discovers that his leg no longer feels like it’s a part of his body. While this book follows familiar terrain — an exploration of how a patient recovers from a neurological trauma — here, the patient is himself, both physically and psychically. An aunt visited him in the hospital and told him, “You’ve always been a rover. There are rovers, and there are settlers, but you’re definitely a rover. You seem to have one strange adventure after another. I wonder if you will ever find your destination.”

It would take three more autobiographies before he could do so. His second effort, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001), started more or less at the beginning. Taking its title from his Uncle Dave who was fascinated with the metal’s properties, Sacks revealed his experiences in a sadistic boarding school during the Blitz, and his childhood fascinations with chemistry, Cuttlefish, H.G. Wells and the periodic table. But the only love affairs he revealed in that book were his love of science.

Fourteen years later in On the Move: A Life (2015), Sacks finally revealed his sexuality for the first time. When he came out to his parents at eighteen, his mother, in her shock, blurted, “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” He wrote about his few gay love affairs while in California in the early 1960s, where he rode around on his motorcycle in a leather jacket and took up other “masculine” activities: weightlifting, mountain climbing, and bodysurfing. But then he was celibate, from 1973, until he met the writer Bill Hayes thirty-five years later:

Shortly after my seventy-fifth birthday in 2008, I met someone I liked. Billy, a writer, had just moved from San Francisco to New York, and we began having dinners together. Timid and inhibited all my life, I let a friendship and intimacy grow between us, perhaps without fully realizing its depth. Only in December of 2009, still recuperating from knee and back surgeries and racked with pain, did I realize how deep it was. Billy was going to Seattle to spend Christmas with his family, and just before he went, he came to see me and (in the serious, careful way he has) said, “I have conceived a deep love for you.” I realized, when he said this, what I had not realized, or had concealed from myself before — that I had conceived a deep love for him too — and my eyes filled with tears. He kissed me, and then he was gone.

…There was an intense emotionality at this time: music I loved, or the long golden sunlight of late afternoon, would set me weeping. I was not sure what I was weeping for, but I would feel an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.

Oliver Sacks and Bill Hayes

After he submitted that manuscript to his publisher, Sacks learned that he had metastatic cancer. He continued writing, including four essays for The New York Times which were collected in the posthumous Gratitude. “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude,” he wrote just a few months before he died. “I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” He died on August 30, 2015. According to his New York Times obituary, “He is survived by his partner of six years, the writer Bill Hayes.”