WHEN Oliver Sacks was asked his profession, he often replied “Explorer”. He did not mean this in the geographical sense. As a boy he had devoured Prescott’s books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru; as a young man he had travelled by foot, train and motorbike the length and breadth of North America. But what became an obsession with him was to climb inside the brains of his patients. He chose specifically those with right-hemisphere disorders; and, having reached those “furthest Arctics and Tropics”, slipping on ice or hacking through the unimaginable, near-impenetrable jungles of the self, he would then describe in extensive and sympathetic detail the world as it appeared from there. So compelling was this urge that even when teaching, as a professor of neurology at Columbia and NYU, and even when in great demand on the lecture circuit, he retained his ordinary medical practice in order to keep exploring.
Over the years he accumulated stacks of clinical records, abundant with every detail of the quirks and tribulations of his patients. He often wrote late into the night, monkish in his solitude. Hundreds of articles and essays, 13 books and (...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1Fligq2
No comments:
Post a Comment