When Dr. Oliver Sacks died last August, age 82, obituaries hailed him as America’s great chronicler of medical oddities. He had told those of us whose brains were reasonably well regulated the bizarre-but-true tales of those who were not so fortunate. This expatriate English Jewish neurologist helped us better see how our synapses fire by showing us just how badly they can misfire.
Through Sacks’s literary effort, boosted by Robin Williams’s dramatic turn in Awakenings, we saw what it was like for patients to emerge from near-comatose states brought on by encephalitus lethargica, by use of a new miracle drug. From Sacks’s other works, we learned more about effing Tourette syndrome, autism, near deafness, colorblindness, visual agnosia, and other sight-based disorders of the brain.
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