By, Daniel Snowman
2 min read
ByDaniel Snowman, Daniel Snowman
I must start by declaring an interest. It was Oliver Sacks's mother, Muriel Elsie Landau, who helped bring me into the world. One of the first female surgeons in England, her special expertise was in obstetrics and gynaecology while she also found time to be an active Zionist and to work for many Jewish causes. "Miss Landau" was a name I learned to revere as a child. But, as Sacks recounts in this latest and most self-revelatory of his many books, his generally warm-hearted and caring mother was appalled on learning that her 18-year-old son was homosexual.
She couldn't get herself to speak to him for several days, he recounts, apparently "haunted" by the biblical verses that declare it an "abomination' to "lie with mankind, as with womankind". Mother and son were soon reconciled, however. Elsie Landau died in 1972 while on a visit to Israel and her death, writes Oliver, was "the most devastating loss of my life".
Now in his early 80s, Sacks is renowned as a leading neurologist who, in a series of best-selling books, has managed to integrate his concerns as doctor and scientist with evocative portrayals of patients and colleagues with whom he has dealt. In what will probably prove to be his final publication, given that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, he focuses on his own life and recounts with astonishing frankness his personal and professional struggles, successes and failures.
Born and raised in London, Oliver Sacks has always been "on the move" (an apt borrowing of the title of Thom Gunn's famous poem), literally so in the USA in the late 1950s and '60s when he immersed himself in the drug-crazed, hippie culture of the time and sped through life on a succession of ever-more macho motorbikes.
But this resolutely independent-minded man also seems to have had a talent for falling out with over-mighty bosses, and periodically finding himself having to move to a new job or home.
He recounts his struggles with astonishing frankness
When in his mid-30s, the head of the US clinic for which Sacks was working told him brutally that the book about migraine he was writing was trash, Sacks answered back, was fired - and some time later discovered that his former boss had surreptitiously published sections from the manuscript under his own name.
Later, Sacks found himself forced out of an apartment adjacent to the hospital where he was working and then out of the job. Was he preternaturally insubordinate? Perhaps. But doubtless he also irritated establishment thinking by identifying too closely with the sufferings of his patients and allowing psychiatric insights to intrude upon the supposedly scientific truths of clinical neurology.
Forever on the move intellectually, Sacks has been a pioneer in the understanding and treatment of conditions scarcely even acknowledged by many in the medical world when he was starting out: autism, for example, or Tourette's syndrome or our psycho-neurological responses to music.
And his many books (not to mention the film Awakenings, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro) have brought his valuable work to public as well as professional attention. No longer do we laugh at the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
Daniel Snowman’s books include a study of the impact of the “émigrés”