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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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kryptiskt ◴[09 Dec 25 19:03 UTC] No.46209091[source]▶
If anything is shocking it is how modern readers have to be spoon fed bullet points and can't handle the slightest complexity of composition.
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1. tim333 ◴[10 Dec 25 13:11 UTC] No.46217283[source]▶
It might be that modern readers have other things they can read/do with their time. In pre internet times it wasn't so much the case - you'd buy a mag or book and then read it but now there are many alternatives a click away.

Pros and cons but often in the old days it was spun out to fill some volume the the printing press was set for like 400 pages in a book. I did Great Expectations at school which had about ten chapters with the main story and then about 60 chapters of irrelevant stuff because Dickens was paid weekly by the chapter.