is 71 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay (which you can hear Garrison Keillor recite):
It’s the birthday of science writer Oliver Sacks, born in London (1933). He’s known for writing about the experiences of people suffering from neurological disorders in books of essays such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). Both his parents were doctors, and he grew up wanting to follow in their footsteps. After graduating from Oxford, he went to California as a doctor of neurology, and he studied people with strange disorders of the mind, such as the inability to form new memories, or the inability to recognize faces.
In the 1960s, he began to treat a group of people suffering from a rare sleeping sickness, and he tried treating them with a drug called L-dopa. He said, “Suddenly … in the lugubrious and vaulted silence … there burst forth the wonder, the laughter, the resurrection of awakenings. Patients motionless and frozen, in some cases for almost five decades, were suddenly able, once again, to walk and talk, to feel and think, with perfect freedom.” Sacks had to help them come to terms with the fact that decades had passed since they’d last been conscious. Then he watched as most of them relapsed back into their catatonic states.
He found the experience profoundly moving, and when he wrote an article about it for a scientific journal, he included his emotional responses as well as his scientific ideas. His colleagues criticized him for getting too personally involved with his subject, so he decided that they were the wrong audience for his work. He began writing a book about his observations that told the story of his experience, and included his personal and philosophical speculations. The result was Awakenings (1973), which was a great success and was eventually made into a movie with Robin Williams.
Oliver Sacks has since gone on to write many books and essays about his patients, and he says that he is trying to revive the practice of storytelling in medicine, because he believes that few things illuminate the human condition better than disease. His most recent book is Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001).
Awakenings is a truly fine film, all the more for being based on actual patients. Robert De Niro is excellent in it, as is Robin Williams.