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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: 0s | 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. cryzinger ◴[09 Dec 25 18:27 UTC] No.46208562[source]▶
Respectfully, I'm not sure you can draw meaningful conclusions about a 100+ paragraph deep-dive article after reading the first eight or nine. The biography stuff is definitely relevant to the takeaways about Sacks' methodology and style:

> Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.”

[...]

> Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze.

[...]

> “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?”

> “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds.

> “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”