Oliver Sacks, The Neurologist With The Soul Of A Humanist, Dies
Oliver Sacks famous neurologist and renowned author of books such as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” or “Awakenings”, Died yesterday August 30, 2015, at 82 years of age Sacks had already announced in February of this year that he was in the terminal stage and that he had just a few months to live. The world thus loses one of the best scientific communicators.
A death announced but equally mourned by the entire scientific community
Sacks leaves us a legacy of inestimable quality in the form of popular literature about the functioning of the organs to which we owe the possibility of thinking, seeing and feeling. His dissertations about what he was researching are almost indistinguishable from the parts in which he narrates experiences and reflections in situ.
This is reflected in his way of writing, direct and accessible to all audiences, not exempt from philosophical questions that are outlined so that the reader can try to answer them. But the quality of Oliver Sacks goes far beyond his knowledge of neurology and his ease with words to easily communicate ideas and concepts that are as fascinating as they are complicated, or his way of posing intellectual challenges to motivate the reader and make him want to know. further.
The vocation for the study of the human being is not the only thing that is reflected in his writings: so does, in a somewhat more veiled but equally manifest way, his heart as a humanist, a force that moved him to love and appreciate the subjective, the private, the emotional and phenomenological, that which belongs to the people he studied and that which he could never have accessed as a scientist.
Throughout his work, Oliver Sacks gave us many great examples of how to talk about disorders and illness with total respect for the patient. In the literature of which he is the author, people who could be considered insane are portrayed with total humanity.
He did not write as if he were dissecting incomplete beings or absolutely different from the rest: eccentric men, women with unusual problems, but never people separated from humanity by an unbridgeable gap. Oliver Sacks talks about these people to show the functioning of the human body: what makes us equal, what works in the same way in each of us, without taking our eyes off the particularity of each human being but without emphasizing the differences. .
That is why his books are possibly the best way to learn about psychiatric illness and the rules that govern our brain without taking our eyes off what makes us capable of feeling, loving and experiencing. The human quality that emerges from the literature written by Oliver Sacks is difficult to find in scientific dissemination, and even less so in that which talks about the engine of our emotions and thoughts.
