Oliver Sacks
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He begins his book quoting a physician from Glasgow named Ivy McKenzie: "The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances."
Dr. Sacks takes this approach throughout, he approaches each patient with all of his scientific knowledge, understanding its great value, but he approaches each one as an individual, as a human who is greater than scientific knowledge. I appreciate the insight from Walker Percy who says that the scientific method, though rich and valuable, can never say anything to the individual human being in their uniquness. (Because it understands the world through finding commonalities).
There is a passage in chapter two where Dr. Sacks is working with an amnesiac who is locked in the past and has his memory wiped clean, back to when he was 19, every few minutes. Dr. Sacks has written to the neurologists Dr. Luria for advise. "There are no prescriptions,' Luria wrote, 'in a case like this. Do whatever your ingenuity and your heart suggest. There is little or no hope of any recovery in this memory. But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being--matters which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him. ... Neuropsychologically, there is little or nothing you can do; but in the realm of the Individual, there may be much you can do."
He goes on to describe a conversation he had soon afterward with one of the sisters of the home where he worked. He asked if Jimmie G (the amnesiac) has a soul. The sisters said "Watch Jimmie in chapel and judge for yourself." So Dr. Sacks does and he was "moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. ... The Sisters were right--he did find his soul here."
And this can lead to what I feel most powerful about these stories ... is their almost true-to-life scientific Kafka ... their absurdity speaks in powerful ways to our own life. Wakens us to what is taken for granted or simply describes and draws out those moments of loss. Dr. Sacks is a great writer and reader, as well as a great scientist and physician. See this passage about Jimmie:
First, when Dr. Sacks first received Jimmie: "He is, as it were, isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all round him. . . He is a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment ... a man without roots, or rooted only in the remote past."
Then in his conclusion of the chapter:
"If Jimmie was briefly 'held' by a task or puzzle or game or calculation, held in the purely mental challenge of these, he would fall apart as soon as they were done, into the abyss of his nothingness, his amnesia. But if he was held in emotional and spiritual attention--in the contemplation of nature or art, in listening to music, in taking part in the Mass in chapel--the attention, its mood, its quietude, would persist for a while, and there would be a pensiveness and peace we rarely, if ever, saw during the rest of his life at the Home."
I remember a friend who was a philosophy major telling me that the big problem that analytic philosophy is currently working on and thinks perhaps there will never be an answer to, is the problem of mind/body. Dr. Sacks addresses it in his introduction as brain/mind. He is aware and chooses to share these case studies as narratives because he believes that though the gulf is acknowledged the two are inseparable and it is a tale and a life which can hold them together.
He also brings to light a valuable perspective on "illness". That "a disease is never a mere loss or excess--that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve identity, however strange the means may be." He says this was recognized long ago in psychiatry, for example in the works of Freud. "Thus, the delusions of paranoia were seen by him not as primary but as attempts (however misguided) at restitution, at reconstructing a world reduced by complete chaos."
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