For many people and in many parts of the world it is spring. As the earth around us bursts into bloom and color, we thought of another type of rebirth, Dr. Oliver Sacks's "Awakenings."
This seminal 1973 work chronicled the lives of patients who during the encephalitis lethargica epidemic contracted a catatonic-like sleep sickness. They remained frozen in time for decades until 1969 when Sacks administered an experimental drug, L-DOPA, and the patients experienced a radical reawakening. He wrote at the time "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” We are reminded and uplifted by new hopes and ideas as the grayed winter corners of local landscapes turn green and fill with frenzied, rapid new growth, reaching upward toward light, unaware of their limited time to flourish.
Awakenings
Sacks said of the patients remerging into a semi state of reality, that what unfolded "came from the most intense medical and human involvement I have ever known, as I encountered, lived with, these patients in a Bronx hospital, some of whom had been transfixed, motionless, in a sort of trance, for decades. Migraine was still in the medical canon, but here I took off in all directions–with allegory, philosophy, poetry, you name it.”
He believed a “fundamental dramatic truth of the experience with all its wonder and despair … That there is still the potential of an intense inner life and individuality even in people who seem so very damaged.” Sacks inherently understood that most patients can tell a clinician what is wrong with them by simply being encouraged to talk.
Sacks was a physician, neurologist, writer, and a natural practitioner of narrative medicine. He shared many patient case histories in books both his own, "A Leg to Stand On," and those featuring his patient's lives and case histories including "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." The New York Times called him "the poet laureate of medicine."
"Gratitude"- a Life of Privilege and Adventure
Sacks work has influenced countless people and professions both within and outside the medical community. For all those who seek to better communicate and understand the human experience, hearing Sacks speak and reading his words offer their own awakening: he was a consumate humanist and storyteller. In his final book, "Gratitude," published the year of his death in 2015, Sacks wrote, "My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
His message was simple, and a clear call to narrative practice and humility- in order to better understand the human condition, one needs to better understand the human.
Sacks died in 2015. In 2021 Audible offered a podcast of his interviews, writings and speeches. Radiant Minds-The World of Oliver Sacks. The nine part series is hosted by Indre Viskontas, whose own pursuit of a career in neurology was in part inspired by Dr. Sacks. The podcast includes rare and previously unpublished archival tapes of Oliver along with his audio diaries.
https://www.oliversacks.com/watch-listen_category/podcast/
