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Oliver Sacks Put Himself into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?

(www.newyorker.com)
47 points barry-cotter | 1 comments | 09 Dec 25 13:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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rendaw ◴[09 Dec 25 16:59 UTC] No.46207335[source]▶
Subtitle

> The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.

TLDR

> after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.

AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title.

From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.

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burningChrome ◴[09 Dec 25 17:27 UTC] No.46207746[source]▶
I agree that its a hard read, and seemingly never got to the point of the title of the article. I started reading it and by about the eighth or nineth paragraph the article was still ruminating on his gay love affair so I just skimmed the rest and I couldn't make heads or tails of the rest of it either.

Its shocking how bad some writers are these days.

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1. paleotrope ◴[09 Dec 25 18:17 UTC] No.46208424[source]▶
If you go further, the whole thing wraps around. His suppression of his own sexuality, led him to embellish, to write out his own internal dialogue into the "nonfiction" books he wrote. So it all eventually comes back to the thesis, but yes, it's a huge drag to read through, but then Sacks' own writing is so turgid and overly dramatic, like he was writing for an audience.

The first sentence too is apt, "butter colored suit that reminded him of the sun" is a great example of Sacks' writing style.