The neurologist’s memoir reveals a rebel with the human touchLike the great 19th-century novelists,the neurologist Oliver Sacks has crystallised different ways of being human for our medicalised times. His chosen literary mode is not the novel, but the clinical tale, or a form inherited from the case histories of Freud and the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria.
George Eliot’s Dorothea,the young, middle-course woman who thinks she can buy into the world of ideas by marriage, or may not be for Sacks. Instead he gives us Miss R,a chronically ill and institutionalised sufferer of the 1920s epidemic of sleeping sickness, who is woken from her frozen Parkinsonian state by the ambiguous miracle of a druggy L-DOPA kiss – and a doctor.
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Source: theguardian.com