Oliver Sacks spent almost 50 years working as a neurologist and during this time wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings and Hallucinations, concerning the atypical neurological experiences of patients he had seen across the sweep of his medical career.
Sacks was, however, much more than a neurologist who wrote about his unusual patients – he has been referred to as the poet laureate of medicine. He was also a competitive weightlifter, an amateur botanist, a zealous recreational drug user, a public intellectual and a motorcycle enthusiast. Most of all however, Sacks was one of the great humanists of our time.
His portfolio of eclectic interests and his deeply humanist way of being in this world are captured comprehensively here. This book, diligently and cogently compiled and introduced by Kate Edgar, his editor, researcher, assistant and friend of more than 30 years, presents a diverse and engrossing collection of his letters to his family and friends and to a motley crew of artists, political figures, scientists and like-minded humanists.
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The letters offer unique and unpolished psychological insights into the Oliver Sacks many of us know as the distinguished and eloquent neurologist and author. They offer a glimpse behind the scenes into the inner world of a man who occupied the outer world with solidity and authority. They paint a portrait of a sometimes shy, uncertain, excitable human and at times a deeply compassionate and open-hearted outsider. These letters are often poignant, tender and remarkably vulnerable, reading them at times feels like reading someone’s private diaries.
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The early letters, of which there are many to his parents, are moving and are testament to how his parents, both medics, loomed large in his psyche. They provide a perspective into a vulnerable Sacks who comes across as a boyish, approval-seeking adolescent well into his adulthood. We get a glimpse into an insecure young gay man finding his way in the world and the edited versions of this world he shares with his parents in letters.
A recurrent psychological theme is what Sacks describes as “abandonment”. At the tender age of six, Sacks was evacuated from London to a boarding school in the countryside at the outbreak of the second World War. He recounts in his memoir the “double abandonment” when, at 18, he admitted his homosexuality; his mother then described him as “an abomination”. While this remained a force in his life, he nevertheless strove to live beyond these early formative experiences into a life of remarkable vitality and compassion.
His letters convey a passionate concern for the people at the margins of society. It is during his neurology training at Beth Abraham he appears to have found his professional calling. He was working clinically with a group of patients with a severe form of Parkinson’s disease, many of whom had been institutionalised for decades and they had become the forgotten ones. Sacks championed pioneering treatments for these people – and in so doing took them from the forgotten margins to the clinical care previously denied to them.
There is also a collection of correspondence with Brian Friel that is fascinating. In a forthright tone concerning Friel’s recently published play Molly Sweeney, Sacks essentially accuses Friel of plagiarism. He claims that Friel’s character Molly is a “virtual duplicate” of the character Virgil from Sacks’s To See and Not See in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. After what appears to be a testy exchange of letters, Friel acquiesces and Sacks gets the acknowledgment he felt was his entitlement.
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It seems from this exchange and other selected correspondences that Sacks was not just the live-and-let-live pacifist some might imagine. These letters offer a glimpse of an assertive, meticulous Sacks who did not mince his words.
If you are new to Sacks, I would suggest not starting with Edgar’s Letters. While they are intriguing and illuminating insights into the back stories of a remarkable storyteller, they do require the context of his back catalogue in my opinion.
Edgar has done an Olympian job with this book. She has captured the arc of a distinguished neurologist and author and a remarkable humanist, but perhaps just as importantly she has captured an Oliver Sacks full of contradiction and imperfection. And this is of course what makes this great humanist of our time relatable, lovable and relevant.
Paul D’Alton is a clinical psychologist.
