Sacks: Outpouchings

• Published in: Minds and Bodies
• Main Author: Mcginn, Colin
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY Oxford University Press 28.08.1997
• Subjects: 20th-Century Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; considerable; neuroscientists; collection; unpublished; neuropathology
• ISBN: 0195113551; 9780195113556
• DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195113556.003.0027

It could be said that Oliver Sacks put neuropathology on the literary map. His first book, Awakenings, about the stunning effects of the drug L-dopa on patients afflicted with a form of Parkinsonism, attracted considerable critical acclaim from the literary world and “inspired” Harold Pinter’s rather ponderous play A Kind of Alaska. Sack’s second book, A Leg to Stand On, was similarly well received. He has published a number of short pieces in the London Review of Books, as well as in its elder American sibling, several of which are reprinted in the present collection, along with twelve previously unpublished pieces. (His book Migraine seems to have excited rather less popular interest, no doubt because it is a less popular kind of book.) Yet the scientists of the nervous system do not seem to have been similarly impressed. When I asked a colleague in neuroanatomy what he thought of Sack’s work he said he had never heard of him, and the neuroscientists I consulted who had heard of him were not inclined to attach any scientific importance to his writings. Unanimity between the two cultures is nor perhaps to be expected, but in the present case the reason for this asymmetry of esteem lies deeper than mere difference of interest. The problem is that it is quite unclear what Sacks is doing.