Will Self

Having met the late Oliver Sacks, neurologist and writer, only twice in my life, the occasions separated by some 36 years, I certainly cannot pretend to any friendship or even acquaintance. Nonetheless, I think I can speak for hundreds, if not thousands, who, while not especially close, nevertheless felt physically touched by the life of this extraordinary man. And touched is surely the right word: on the second occasion I met Oliver, in April of this year, he spoke of what a dreadful anatomy student he had been, barely able to conceive of all the convolutions within – yet, and he laughed at this, he’d always been a whizz at doing lumbar punctures, which can be notoriously difficult and excruciatingly painful. “How did you manage it?” I asked, and he said: “Touch, I could just feel where the needle should go.”

When I got home I looked at some of the photographs of Sacks with his neurological patients that have been reproduced in his books, and I saw that, in almost every one, he was touching his patients, while it was evident from his expression that he was also getting a feel for them, as individuals, engaging with them personally – and their pathologies. Sacks’s writing did the same job, at once pitilessly forensic and nakedly emotional: in none of his medical writings were his subjects objectified or otherwise reduced to mere quantifiable relevance.

I read Sacks’s books as they appeared, beginning in the late 1970s when I worked as a book packer for his publishers, Duckworth. At one of the notoriously bibulous parties thrown by Duckworth’s then chairman, Colin Haycraft, I met Sacks for the first time. He had a man with Tourette syndrome with him who was, I presume, either a patient, a friend, or – which is more likely, given Oliver’s overall disposition – both. At any rate, this man was running around the book stacks in the publishers’ open-plan office shouting “Fuck! Shit! Damn!” And Sacks was chatting away – which at the time struck me as bizarre. But I remember we spoke of Hume, and his view that human identity was transmitted moment-to-moment, as motion is transferred from one ballbearing to the next in a Newton’s cradle. And Sacks said, “Mm, philosophy, green,” and took a green Biro of that colour out of a row of differently coloured Biros in his top pocket and made note.



A glancing encounter – but it had a profound effect on me. Here was an order of tolerance of human diversity you don’t see every day, and – it seemed to me – a deep appreciation of the non-equivalence of behavioural norms and our sense of being. For me, Sacks’s writings, taken in their entirety, represent a sustained resistance to the pretensions of medical science. What he particularly took issue with was medicine’s need to explain away the integrity of pathologies – whether we think of them as mental or physical – to our sense of ourselves, by reason of their ability to cure us of them. A self-described “Jewish atheist”, his was a healing ministry, carried out in the form of case histories conceived of as literary portraiture. His only anecdotes concerned himself and recalled a life of exquisitely eccentric legerdemain, in which, besides having a jam-full professional existence of near-constant clinical work and journal articles, he made time to compose some of the greatest medical literature of the past half-century. Oh, and there was the membership of the “ton-up” motorcyclists’ club in 1950s England, the championship weightlifting and the hallucinogenic experimenting in 1960s California and New York – throughout it all, a determined inclusion of his patients into his life, and a lot of wild swimming.

The second time I met Oliver he invited me to tea at his London hotel. It was a valedictory visit to England for him, and he was accompanied by his partner, the writer Bill Hayes. Oliver had seen his old, close friend Jonathan Miller, and reflecting on the longevity of the friendships between them and a third great polymath, Eric Korn, it was hard not to feel like those dispirited tribal peoples who speak of the mighty doings of their ancestors. Not that Oliver seemed dispirited – he and Bill had been swimming in Hampstead Pond that morning: “We like to listen to music on headphones while we swim,” Oliver vouchsafed. We spoke of consciousness – an essay on time and consciousness he’d published in the New York Review of Books a few years previously had struck me as pointing a very straight path towards cracking its ineffable mysteries, and Oliver said he felt in some ways vindicated by the new neuro-imaging techniques that seemed to demonstrate the astonishing plasticity of the human brain-mind.

And we spoke of a lot more, in quite a short time. I confess; that first meeting, in conjunction with his writings, had inspired me so much over the years that I had, quite shamelessly, adapted aspects of Oliver’s life and work for my own fictions, and so, to be in his presence again after so many years was like some strange completion of a narrative loop (we also spoke of the narratological view of human identity, which at times he’d advocated, and Oliver said now that if impending mortality taught anything, it was that life was not a story we tell to ourselves). Even so, I wasn’t so crass, I hope, as to overstay my welcome.

Walking towards the tube, I considered quite how overpoweringly lovable I’d found Oliver – and Bill – to be; and I am not a man easily moved, at least not to love. How much harder and harsher it must be for those who were genuinely close to Oliver Sacks – for family, friends, and those scores of patients-cum-friends on whom he bestowed his touch.

Oliver Sacks at Muscle Beach

Andrew Solomon

Oliver Sacks – physician, writer, weightlifter, motorcyclist, pianist, swimmer, and humanitarian – has died at 82, leaving us bereft not only of his many talents, but also of their singular conjunction in him. He was a very fine doctor and an excellent writer, but he was most remarkable for bringing humanity to medicine and scientific rigour to narrative non-fiction. He was drawn to the difficult cases: people with apparently impenetrable neurological conditions who were largely abandoned by their own society. In order to treat them, he had to locate their concealed humanity. He adopted a holistic approach before there was even a name for it, and believed that you could not cure someone you did not know. Though his tone could be clinical, there was compassion behind it, a noticing of the souls trapped behind obscuring circumstances. With an almost childlike capacity for delight, Sacks revelled in a constant bravado of discovery, applied both to his patients and their conditions. He was to modern medicine as the handmade is to the machined: careful, laborious and beautiful by virtue of a rich inexactitude.

He sometimes obtruded on what he described with a bestowing air, but that constant presence, which could feel undisciplined and unmedical, was requisite to his particular brand of intimacy. In his books, he insisted that we like his characters as well as know their conditions, and so he made them startlingly alive. He was both exploitative of and deferential to them, telling their stories without regard for seemliness and without filtering out personal details – but in doing so, he achieved a collective dignity for all the afflicted. You cannot read his books and doubt the humanity of incomprehensible humans.

Jewish and gay, Sacks felt like an outsider in his native Britain; he was relieved to be an alien when he came to the United States. Experimentation with drugs in his early years in the US very nearly killed him. His amphetamine addiction seems to have been rooted both in his florid enthusiasm for new experiences and in a strange carelessness about his own devalued life, a troubling modesty that coexisted with medical egoism. As a young man, he was happiest alone on his motorcycle, on which he covered vast distances, or competing in bodybuilding competitions. He was ascetic to a fault, oddly careless about his appearance, his food, and his home. Yet he was also capable of aesthetic ecstasies, and understood music in particular at a deep, nearly mystical level. He could hear colour everywhere and was an accomplished pianist. He was capable of enormous wit, and his writing is suffused with a memorable sense of humour, a lightness that seduces us into his immensely serious topics. No irony of his patients’ situations went unremarked.

Robert De Niro (left) and Robin Williams in the film of Awakenings (1990). Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Columbia

Sacks liked risks, but he was also in some ways deeply conservative; his discretion extended well beyond the realm of valour. He held back and leaped forth in alarming but spectacular succession. He kept secrets, but made you trust him. He advertised his prosopagnosia, but his distant bearing was not entirely a function of face-blindness; he was also extremely shy, and while he loved people with a vast range of authentic disabilities, he did not suffer fools gladly. He had a taste for fame and glamour, and proudly counted a range of impressive people among his acquaintance.

He seemed like a voice at the centre that spoke for the margins, but he was at a margin of his own, and he understood the dismaying abnormalities of his patients in part because of his own sense of abnormality, enforced by a homophobic mother and by an internalised homophobia that kept him celibate for much of his adult life. To be so empathetic and so lonely seems odd; someone so capable of accompanying those in pain should have had a line out the door of people eager to marry him. But he found love at the very end of his life, and in his last book, the memoir On the Move, paints a touching portrait of that revelation.

Sacks was not made uncomfortable by what unnerves most of us. He wielded his clinical obligation like Perseus’s shield, in which a cavalcade of Medusas lost their stony power. Patients whose condition would have made others throw up their arms seem to have delighted him. Though the outpourings in Sacks’s journals can feel prolific to the point of profligacy, he listened, always, far more than he spoke, and when he spoke, he did so with moral authority. It was audacious to be as careful as he was about the spiritual vulnerabilities of the profoundly impaired. He saw early that science was moving to explain people more and more in biological terms, and insisted that this progress not blind us to their idiosyncrasies, to the choices they made as they retained, always, some agency. In an age of medical predestination, he was a voice for free will.

Sue Halpern

If there was one thing the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks might not have anticipated following his death this week from metastatic cancer, it was becoming media click bait. And yet, there was the headline in the Daily Mail topping his obituary: “The Drug-Taking Muscleman Who Brought People Back from the Dead: The mind-blowing life of Oliver Sacks, the ‘poet laureate of medicine’ who has died aged 82.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post promised to reveal “The Tragic Story of Oliver Sack’s Celibacy.” It needn’t have bothered. The man wrote of it himself, unsalaciously, in On the Move, a memoir of glorious, unflinching honesty.

Sacks was a swimmer who dived into cold, dark water alone and unafraid. (Sometimes metaphors are true.) He was eager, always, to report back what he had seen. On the Move was his 13th book, and new essays, written in his final days, are just now coming out.

As a doctor and a writer, Sacks was an ardent observer. People interested him, not as subjects, not even as patients exactly, though he was an attentive and tender clinician, but as individuals with stories worth sharing. It was the same with the natural world, at whose wonder he was still marvelling, and reminding us to marvel at as well, at the very end.

Sacks introduced us to the strange and miraculous architecture of the human brain, to people who had lost the ability to talk but not to play the piano, to people like himself who could not remember faces, to people with diseases and conditions that rendered them freaks to others but not to him and then, by extension, not to us.

This might have been his greatest gift, the gift of empathy and compassion. There is no way to read his books or his essays and take anyone’s life, and the elements that animate it, for granted. By writing about perception, he changed ours.