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

Posted by barry-cotter 21 hours ago

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Comment by rendx 16 hours ago

In case this piqued your interest, I really enjoyed the documentary about his life's journey, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks%3A_His_Own_Life - can recommend! (Also, fan of his books and research.)

Comment by svat 4 hours ago

This was a nice profile of (one side of) Sacks and his life, and as usual some mischievous or click-seeking online editor has given it a headline (and sub-heading) that are almost completely unrelated to what the article is about. In fact, at the bottom it says:

> Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.”

and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this.

The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.

Comment by zerofor_conduct 19 hours ago

https://archive.ph/0MFPK

Comment by sshadmand 9 hours ago

Loved Oliver Sacks. He was such a kid at heart with a big brain and soft demeanor. His interviews are great. Here is one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AnuxDdg2II It is rare a lisp can improve how one sounds, but I like his.

Comment by rendaw 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by AdamN 17 hours ago

Just a nit but it's the New Yorker, not the NYT.

Comment by cryzinger 17 hours ago

Also worth noting that the New Yorker published a lot of essays from Sacks when he was alive. So there's a sort of meta thing happening here with a biography of one of their famous contributors.

Comment by 17 hours ago

Comment by burningChrome 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by paleotrope 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by kryptiskt 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by cryzinger 16 hours ago

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.”

Comment by RodgerTheGreat 16 hours ago

The New Yorker's primary editorial thrust has always been that the author is more important than the subject, and the journey is more important than having a thesis at all.

Comment by giraffe_lady 16 hours ago

I love when the new yorker gets posted to HN because of how many people will proudly announce themselves not equal to the challenge of a mainstream middlebrow magazine article.

Comment by shermantanktop 16 hours ago

That description (mainstream middlebrow) would have been accurate in 1980. I don't think it is anymore.

Long form journalism is not a common thing anymore, men (who dominate HN) are not enthusiastic readers anymore, and the cultural conversation that a dead-tree magazine represents is no longer amplified in mass media (as opposed to an era when David Frost and Dick Cavett had primetime shows on TV).

I don't disagree about the reverse snobbery, but IMO people being "not equal to the challenge" isn't the actual problem.

Comment by quesera 12 hours ago

I don't think it's as revealing as you suggest.

Writers write, and editors edit, for an audience. HN is definitely not a perfect match for the New Yorker's intended audience.

But most readers of the New Yorker would choke on the kind of stuff that is perfectly aligned with HN's readership, so...

Comment by burningChrome 15 hours ago

I love most of their stuff and the writing is pretty eloquent as it takes you on a journey that's easy to follow and flows easily from one paragraph to another.

This was just a slog that I felt went nowhere and the points were buried in between rambling information about Sacks and his gay lifestyle, lovers and living in NYC and the gay lifestyle there at the time.

Not only was it not interesting, it was poorly written and hard to read. Sometimes writers just need to stick to the facts instead of trying to write another "The Phenomenology of Spirit" for a "middlebrow magazine".

Comment by stevenwoo 14 hours ago

I read four other articles in this week's New Yorker by the time I got to this one and the problem it has is we are probably at this point all familiar with the story of a gay person coming to accept themselves and there was nothing new in this version for a very long time so when it belabors the point there is a real danger to losing the audience, I read the magazine just prior to bed and gave up on this one after first attempt, enjoyed the rest of the magazine (even some of the culture articles about New York residents) and came back to this article and fell asleep.

Comment by expedition32 13 hours ago

In a few decades reading will be a lost art. Yes the stats are really that worrying.

Comment by CPLX 16 hours ago

Exactly.

It's the equivalent of those people on Reddit or social media in general who make fun of three-star Michelin restaurants.

I get that sometimes you just want McDonald's, and I don't think there is a definition of better and worse in either of these contexts that doesn't require injecting some kind of taste. But nonetheless.

Comment by RC_ITR 16 hours ago

Speaking of suboptimal writing, why call it a 'gay' love affair, when he was openly gay?

Comment by Matterless 15 hours ago

One of the most important details of Sacks's life which dogged him nearly to the end (and which is important to this NY piece), was a minimization by Sacks of his own sexuality. He was not "openly gay" at all.

Comment by usednet 17 hours ago

A responsible journalist can't say directly that Sacks was a confabulist but they can point out facts and allow the reader to infer. That's what the article does. There are many facts in the article that are relevant to the title in this sense (the prime number twins, the journal entries about Hat, etc.).

I also don't agree with your interpretation of what the article is trying to paint Sacks as, though of course you are entitled to it.

I think the the point of the article is to articulate what Sacks himself said:

> "As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”"

Comment by tomcam 15 hours ago

Haven’t read the article yet, but I love the respect with which you pointed out your differences to GP. thank you.

Comment by devilbunny 11 hours ago

As a general rule, neurologists are an odd bunch. I'm married to one; I've met lots of them at her conferences.

Comment by ajb 9 hours ago

The stereotype, which is sometimes true, is that people do that kind of degree because they want to understand and solve their own issues. Those who are are interested in people as such, can be more drawn to anthropology.