Oliver Sacks has devoted much of his life to the obsessive study of human perception.
As a scientist and writer – though his critics would never describe him in that order – he has long been seduced by the bizarre: The man who mistook his wife for a hat, the novelist who woke up to discover he couldn't read the morning paper, the patient who fell asleep for 50 years.
Now, at 77, with his own perception failing him on several fronts, the doctor finds himself, ironically, immersed in the most medically mundane condition imaginable: aging.
His right ear is deaf. One eye is completely blind, while the other is cloudy with a cataract. He has endured painful surgery on his knee, shoulder and back, which remain sore and stiff such that he walks with a cane.
“I now think of old age as a sort of disease, so I'm already a patient. … Incidentally, it turns out I'm not completely sure that I'm a good one,” says the doctor, sitting in his Greenwich Village office, where his desk is cluttered with neurological textbooks, periodic tables and, oddly, the snorkel he uses during his morning swim.
Dr. Sacks's latest book, The Mind's Eye, is an examination of the neurological disorders that affect vision. His interest, however, as always, is not his subjects' disabilities, but rather their curious capacity to compensate for them.
And so we meet Lilian, a celebrated concert pianist who sits down to play Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in front of an audience, but suddenly finds the sheet music unrecognizable. With time, she loses the ability to recognize other objects and to remember, but for some reason her ability to play piano clings on.
We also meet Dr. Sacks himself, not as a doctor but as a patient who is struck with melanoma in his right eye, a diagnosis he was stunned to receive in 2005.
He describes the optical illusions his brain concocts in an effort to compensate for the subsequent loss of his vision, filling in objects in his growing blind spot. He also writes about his frustration with a medical system that can't schedule radiation treatment quickly enough, and his sense of desperation, bargaining at one point with his tumour to take his eye but spare his life.
Dr. Sacks has been both praised and criticized for his ability to write empathetically about science. When he joined the faculty of Columbia University three years ago, he received the new designation of “artist,” a nod to both the neurologist and the writer coexisting in him.
But some scientists scoff at Dr. Sacks's shtick, his propensity to befriend his patients to get their stories, saying it compromises a doctor's necessary objectivity.
Others say he abuses his patients' trust by writing about their misfortunes for a general audience, essentially profiting from their afflictions.
Dr. Sacks bristles at this. Fundamentally, he believes that science and academics versus art and popular writing is a false dichotomy, and a recent one at that. “In the last century, for example, not only [Charles] Darwin's books, but his articles were read by gardeners and pigeon-fanciers and the general public. This divide was not there,” he said.
“The average man,” he says, “is much more intelligent than one might think.”
Spend an hour with Dr. Sacks and you realize his existence is, in some ways, a constant struggle to blur boundaries and collapse walls. His apartment and his office, for example, are separate but interchangeable, both equipped with beds, showers, desks, and typewriters. The British-born neurologist has lived in New York for years, but has never taken U.S. citizenship, preferring the limbo status of “resident alien.” At Columbia, he often crosses campus from the medical faculty to the arts faculty where he conducts workshops on creative non-fiction writing.
