A Tribute to Oliver Sacks

‘What do you mean you haven't read Oliver Sacks?’ This was a conversation taking place in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment, whose every wall was lined with books, in Brooklyn, New York, springtime 2013.I faced my interlocutor - a teacher of English literature - wordlessly. There was nothing to say. Simply put, my failure to have investigated anew the writings of the legendary English neurologist was an absurdity, considering that at that moment, my life was consumed with the struggle to write a book that more than trenched on Sacksian territory, a book about the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis, a book that involved, in part, the story of a man who, after a stroke, had lost the ability to speak.

My host - I shall call him Chris N. - promptly reached towards the shelf above his head and pulled down - what else? - The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Sacks’ early, classic collection of case studies. After a moment's consideration, Chris N. flipped to the essay entitled ‘The Lost Mariner’ and, with his perfectly fitting English accent, began aloud:

It immediately made me think of a patient of mine in whom these questions are precisely exemplified: charming, intelligent, memoryless Jimmy G., who was admitted to our Home for the Aged near New York City early in 1975, with a cryptic transfer note saying, ‘Helpless, demented, confused and disoriented.’

‘My state exactly’, I put in, an instant testament to one of Sacks’ most profound gifts: to let his readers identify with the very people we might otherwise see as quite alien, quite other. In his hands, they become familiar again. Sacks had now entered my life, and would soon become a muse, a guide, and even a moral compass.

Oliver Sacks grew up in a North London world where accomplishment was the norm and the expectation. His parents were both doctors; indeed, his mother was one of the first female surgeons in England. Sacks himself would, by the end of his life, have essentially created a new genre of literature: what