Oliver Sacks is a practicing eccentric as well as our leading
literaryneurologist. Nervy yet shy, he clings to the back wards helping
reconstruct life in the face of neural disaster.
pt: Did you come to this country to write or to travel? I
understand that you were zigzagging around the country on a
motorcycle.
os: I came over from England in the summer of 1960, and first spent
some months hitchhiking through Canada, fire fighting in British
Columbia. I was very much feeling between two worlds: I've left Europe
and I don't know where I'm going to stay. I'm not entirely sure then that
I want to continue being a doctor. I was free. I didn't have my green
card. Work and regular life were due to start in July of '61. So I took
off.
pt: Was becoming a doctor inevitable for you but not really your
major interest?
os: I think it was ultimately inevitable.
pt: Because your parents were doctors?
os: Probably so, and probably because human behavior, the mind, and
the brain are the most interesting things in the universe. But I've been
through many other things in the universe, as it were. My first passions
were for the physical sciences; then zoology and botany. Then I wanted to
study physiology. I came to patients relatively late. I'm glad I had this
slow course through the sciences, rather than being immediately drawn in
by feeling, by the impulse to heal, which is fine and noble--but I came
the other way.
pt: Is the impulse to heal not the most interesting aspect of
medicine for you?
os: I want to do something, if I can. Even with incurable,
advancing neurological disease there are always things to be done,
adaptations to be made. But curiosity or some exploring impulse, wanting
to understand what life is about, may be a stronger, safer motive.
pt: In your most recent book, An Anthropologist on Mars, one car
bumps another car, causing a man to lose his color vision--not just any
man, but an artist who dwells in the world of color. Life sounds awfully
fragile.
os: Well, it is and it isn't. When I was in Boston yesterday, I
visited a writer who all but died after eating a red snapper in Florida
and getting ciguatera poisoning. I saw a patient a couple of years ago
who was on his way to lunch with a colleague, walking down Fifth Avenue,
when a gust of wind blew a glass table off a 30th floor balcony. The
glass smashed on the way down and sent an arrow of glass straight into
the back of his brain.
Having said that, I'm also impressed by how tough and resilient we
are. Perhaps more than any other species on.the earth. We live in all
possible climes. We survive concentration camps and starvation and heat
and cold. I have a heightened sense both of the fragility and of the
toughness of it.
pt: What strikes me is how exotic all of the people in your book
are, their disorders. How on earth do you find them? You don't just call
Bizarre Central for the latest talent.
os: If, as you say, I have some adventures into the exotic, this is
only for part of the time. i still go to hospitals and see my regular
patients. I've been at the same hospital in the Bronx for 29 years. But
the phone rings, the mailman comes. People contact me.
pt: Surely you don't pursue every one. Which do you select, and on
what basis?
os: Certain things attract me, conditions which are deep, complex,
strange, like autism and Tourette's syndrome, especially if the people
who have them are in touch with the impact of this on their thoughts and
feelings and can be articulate. But when I got a call about Virgil--I
never thought I would run into something like this--someone who had been
virtually blind from birth and who had, in fact, just been given sight.
And who then ran into trouble. Virgil is not too articulate. He is not a
remarkable man. But he's in a remarkable situation. Not just in a Barnum
and Bailey way, but remarkable in the illumination it may give into brain
and mind and life and being a person. It is the remarkable which captures
my attention.
pt: Do you have a wish list of disorders you would love to have
fall into your lap?
os: Yeah. Since you've put it that way. At the moment, I'm seeing a
number of people who were born totally color blind. But there is
something else which is extremely rare. I know of a patient in Germany
who has motion blindness. She may see a cow or a person clearly, but as
soon as they move, they vanish then reappear for her.
Sometimes she is stuck in a freeze frame, so that in pouring tea or
coffee there may be a solid motion or spout, like a glacier coming out,
and then suddenly, a big puddle, as she moves from one stuck frame to
another, a few seconds later. I would love to speak with this woman and
spend time with her. We take color for granted, how much more do we take
motion?
pt: What sorts of illumination will you find in this kind of
exploration?
Tags:
adaptations,
anthropologist on mars,
autism,
becoming a doctor,
being a doctor,
botany,
brain,
british columbia,
car bumps,
consciousness,
green card,
interesting things,
major interest,
neurological disease,
Oliver sacks,
passions,
physical sciences,
physiology,
two worlds,
vision,
wards,
zoology
