BOOK REVIEW
ON THE MOVE:
A LIFE
Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015
Reviewed by
M. Saleem Seyal, MD, FACC, FACP
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution, I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and
what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a
moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
From David Hume’s “My Own Life” (1776)
O
n February 19, 2015, Dr. Oliver Sacks,
an eminent and highly admired neurologist, declared unflinchingly in
The New York Times Opinion Pages in a very
personal, moving and evocative piece entitled
“My Own Life” that he had terminal metastatic
cancer, having had an ocular melanoma removed and leaving him blind in one eye almost
a decade ago. (www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/
opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html).
The news of his terminal illness has been devastating for Dr. Sacks’
fans, patients and admirers - both medical and non-medical - who
have looked forward with anticipation to his prodigious literary
output year after year.
Oliver Sacks is an 81-year-old New York neurologist, a self-described “Jewish-atheist” who is an immigrant physician from Britain,
now having lived in the United States for almost half a century. He is
a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review
of Books. His latest article about Spalding Gray - a brilliant actor
and writer who developed frontal lobe injury with depression after
a car accident with eventual disastrous results - was published in
the April 27, 2015 issue of The New Yorker under the title of “The
Catastrophe.” He is a mesmerizing storyteller and a prolific author
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
with an impressive literary oeuvre and has been dubbed “The Poet
Laureate of Medicine” by the New York Times. He is a professor at
the NYU School of Medicine.
He was the youngest of four children, born in July 1933 to a
Jewish physician couple in North London, Samuel Sacks a family
physician and mother Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female
surgeons in England. To avoid the Blitzkrieg at the start of WWII
in 1939, he and his brother Michael were evacuated to a boarding
school away from London, and both boys endured cruel corporal
punishments from a sadistic headmaster. During his boyhood, he
enjoyed riding his motorbike and reading literature and science, and
also came to the realization that he was gay. During this time, he
was an amateur chemist and set up a chemistry lab in his London
home, as recalled in his earlier memoir “Uncle Tungsten- Memories
of a Chemical Boyhood (2001).” Michael gradually suffered from
psychosis and was eventually diagnosed to have schizophrenia.
Two older brothers became physicians and Oliver enrolled in the
Queen’s College, Oxford and after his requisite premedical education, he obtained his medical degree from the same institution in
1958. He completed his internship in Medicine and Neurology at
the Middlesex Hospital in London. To avoid being drafted into the
army, and also to escape incarceration or castration for being gay
(homosexuality was a criminal offence and was not decriminalized