Drug-taking muscleman who brought people back from the dead
As ‘poet laureate of medicine’ Oliver Sacks dies at 82, the mind-blowing life of the brilliant...
The middle of the night at a New York mental hospital. A middle-aged patient called Leonard Lowe has climbed out of bed and walked to the recreation room. he’s now sitting in his pyjamas at a white Formica table. This in itself is a medical miracle. Since childhood, Leonard has been locked in a strange, motionless trance. he last moved, and spoke, more than 30 years ago. his doctor, a young, bearded neurologist who recently joined the hospital staff, can scarcely believe his eyes.
‘It’s late,’ says the doctor. ‘ everyone’s asleep.’ Leonard looks up, and smiles. ‘I’m not asleep!’ he replies.
If this feels familiar, that’s because it’s one of the best moments from 1990 hollywood film Awakenings, which starred Robert De Niro as Leonard and Robin Williams as his ingenious, unorthodox doctor.
The Oscar-nominated movie tells how dozens of men and women rendered virtually immobile for decades by a rare (and supposedly incurable) form of encephalitis, are given the experimental drug L-dopa.
The results are stunning. Many of the patients begin to move, talk, laugh and cry. A few get up to sing and dance. After years in a trance, warehoused in institutions for the clinically insane, they appear, quite literally, to wake up.
It is a deeply touching tale — particularly since it’s based on a real incident, which took place in New York in the late Sixties. Those events feel even more moving today following the news that Oliver Sacks, the kindly doctor who Robin Williams so memorably played, has died, aged 82.
Professor Sacks, who had cancer, was often described as the ‘ poet laureate of medicine’, thanks to both his pioneering work with the mentally ill and his gift for writing about it.
The author of a number of books, many of them about rare or unusual conditions such as autism and Tourette’s syndrome, he topped the bestseller lists with works detailing the case histories of his clients, including The Man Who Mistook his Wife For A hat, and An Anthropologist On Mars.
Sacks, who was born in Britain but lived in New York for 40 years, was known in the trade as a deeply gifted physician, who achieved remarkable results. But he owed his wider fame to an ability to explain neurology in a way the common man could understand.
AS Such, he was able to contribute hugely towards raising public understanding of mental illness. More than a million copies of his books were sold in the u.S. alone, and his work was translated into more than 25 languages. The Man Who Mistook his Wife For A hat, published in 1985, was recently voted one of the 25 most influential books ever written about science, by readers of Discover magazine, which declared: ‘Legions of neuroscientists now probing the mysteries of the human brain cite this book as their greatest inspiration.’
he could also blend science with philosophy and commentary. Many of his most popular books, including Awakenings, used neurology as a jumping- off point to explore wider questions about the human condition.
With his trademark beard, and circular spectacles, Sacks (who liked to spend two hours a day swimming, often in busy commercial waters around New York) was also a leading figure in the arts. his circle of acquaintances included the poets W. h. Auden and Thom Gunn, director Jonathan Miller and playwright harold Pinter.
Among those paying tribute yesterday were historian Simon Schama, who described the news of his death as ‘devastating’; biologist Richard Dawkins, who said he ‘greatly admired’ Sacks; and J. K. Rowling, who described him as a ‘great, humane and inspirational’ man who had enjoyed ‘a life well lived’.
In more recent years, that life had formed the basis of a trio of colourful memoirs, the last of which, On The Move, has been in the bestseller lists for the past six months. They chronicled a life that at times seemed as unusual as the case histories of his troubled clients.
The fourth and youngest son of Jewish doctors, he grew up in a large house in London’s Willesden Green which is today the hQ of the British Association of Psychotherapists. his father, Samuel, was a GP. Mother elsie was one of Britain’s first female surgeons.
They gave their boys a deeply unorthodox childhood. elsie, who wanted her sons to pursue careers in science, would bring home human foetuses in jam jars, and dissect them in front of her sons to teach them about the brain. When Oliver was 12 she took him to a morgue and made him watch her dissect an adult corpse.
During World War II, Oliver and his brother Michael were evacuated to a boarding school in the Midlands (though he later went to fee-paying St Paul’s, in London). There, according to a recent magazine profile, ‘they subsisted on meagre rations of turnips and beetroot and suffered cruel punishments at the hands of a sadistic headmaster’.
Soon afterwards, perhaps as a result of the bullying and beatings, Michael became schizophrenic. ‘A sense of shame, of stigma, of secrecy entered our lives, compounding the actuality of Michael’s condition,’ Sacks said later.
As Michael went on and off medication, and alternated between psychosis and lethargy, Sacks became ever more fascinated by the inner workings of the human mind.
More trauma followed during his time at Oxford in the Fifties, when Sacks, a medical student, realised he was gay. Aged 21, he told his father.
‘The next morning, my mother came tearing down the stairs, shrieking at me, hurling Deuteronomical curses, horrible judgmental accusations,’ he recalled. ‘This went on for an hour. Then she fell silent. She remained completely silent for three days, after which normalcy returned. The subject was never mentioned again during her lifetime.’
It was perhaps little wonder that, after going on holiday to canada following medical studies at Oxford, Sacks should send a telegram to his parents containing a single word: ‘Staying.’ he ended up first in San Francisco and then Los Angeles, where he got a job as a neurologist at ucLA hospital, and devoted himself to the sexually promiscuous excesses of the Swinging Sixties.
For several years, he spent his free time bodybuilding ( holding a california record, for a ‘full squat’ with 600 lb across his shoulders), riding motorcycles (he was consulting physician for the hell’s Angels), and taking vast amounts of LSD.
‘I lived on Venice Beach, and disguised myself as a muscle builder at the open air jungle gym,’ he once said. ‘I was quite suicidal: I took every drug, my only principle being “every dose an overdose”. I used to race motorcycles in the Santa Monica mountains.
‘I would take some of the patients, the MS victims, and the paraplegics who hadn’t moved in years — they’d ask me and I’d take them out, strapped to my back, motorcycling in the mountains.
‘ It was a tremendously selfdestructive period: one day I looked at myself in the mirror, my cheeks all sunken, and I said: “Ollie, keep this up and you won’t be here in another year”.’
SO he gave up drugs and bodybuilding, sold his motorbike, and declared himself celibate. In 1965, he moved to New York, where he came across two groups of patients who would inspire his famous works.
One were migraine sufferers, the subject of his first book. The second were the residents of Beth Abrahams hospital in the Bronx — the patients in Awakenings.
Sacks attributed his ability to recognise that behind their trancelike facade, these patients were conscious and lucid, to his experimentation with mind-altering drugs.
Tragically, however, the Awakenings story didn’t have a happy ending. After a brief period in which patients appeared to recover, Sacks was dismayed to observe that many such as Leonard Lowe would begin to suffer from ticks and seizures, a side effect of treatment with L-dopa. They would become overwhelmed by them, and some would return to their original condition.
Sacks would also suffer personal misfortune. After 40 years of celibacy, in 2008 he met and fell in love with Billy hayes, a writer. But soon he was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer, which spread to his liver.
‘I am face to face with dying,’ Sacks wrote in a New York Times article announcing his terminal illness earlier this year.
But he still showed his trademark grace and wisdom.
‘I cannot pretend I am without fear,’ he continued. ‘ But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written.
‘Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.’