Almanac of Story Tellers: Oliver Sacks

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of July 9th

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    It is the 190th day of the year, leaving 175 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1933, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks was born in London.

    Sacks wrote his stories about people who carried with them strange, extraordinary  afflictions of the brain. He wrote his stories with compassion and a desire to explain how the brain sometimes goes off-kilter. 

    Indeed, one of his stories related to his own malady of psychogenic leg paralysis, which he went through after a mountaineering accident. In his book,  A Leg to Stand On, Sacks wrote about his struggles trying to persuade doctors to listen to him and accept that his injury (and accompanying troubled mental state) was real instead of perceived.

    In addition to countless medical papers and articles, Sacks wrote 18 books. Many of them are about cases stories of patients (appropriately disguised) who came to him with uncommon but real neurological disorders. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he wrote about visual agnosia, a condition that leaves people with the inability to recognize faces or other objects.

    In Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, he wrote about various conditions and their connection to music. For instance, people who have perfect pitch may seem blessed, but often would grow irritated when some sounds did not meet their expectations. Another topic he delved into is synesthesia, where a person will "see" music, numbers, letters, and other items as something else -- colors, shapes, or various sounds -- and have to learn how to deal with it.

    Reared and educated in England -- his medical degree comes from Queen's College, Oxford -- he moved to the United States after graduation and he took positions at hospitals in San Francisco and New York. His longest tenured position was as staff neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, where he worked from 1966 to 2007.

   

    It was there that he found a situation that led him to write what it perhaps his best known book, Awakenings, later turned into a movie starring Robin Williams. Sacks had a number of patients who had contracted the sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, during the 1915-1928 epidemic. Those patients later suffered from a form of Parkinson's disease that left them in various catatonic states with symptoms such as immobility, an inability to speak, or depression.  

    

    Sacks discovered that a the drug L-dopa, along with other appropriate therapies and treatments, could relive those symptoms. For a time it worked, although they later regressed.

    Sacks died in 2015 in New York.