Oliver Sacks: Professor Brainstorm

Dr Oliver Sacks, the man behind The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, is probably a genius. The neurologist and writer carries a periodic table in his pocket for comfort, and is fanatically interested in ferns. But how is he at coping with the real world?

Deborah Ross
Monday 24 June 2002 00:00 BST
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I meet Dr Oliver Sacks – who is what? Neurologist? Writer? Doctor? Or all three and a full-blown, one-off genius? – at a London hotel. He is English, yes, but has lived in New York since the Sixties. Do you, I ask, ever miss England at all? "Very rarely," he replies. Although, that said, "the sight of an English hedgerow can reduce me to tears." So it's up to his suite where, on the little table, he has spread out a variety of plant books as well as a copy of his latest book, Oaxaca Journal, which is about... well, ferns. Or, more particularly, a recent fern-seeking trip to Mexico in the company of the American Fern Society. (He is also, by the way, a member of the British Pteridological Society. I put this in just because I love the word "pteridological" which, come to think of it, might now be quite the biggest word I know. )

Dr Sacks is mad about many things. He is mad about stereoscopes ("an optical instrument with two eyepieces used to impart a three-dimensional effect to two photographs of the same scene taken at slightly different angles", and not available from Woolworths) and is a member of the American Stereoscopic Society. He is mad about the periodic table, a copy of which he carries in his wallet. He is mad about scuba diving. He is mad about 19th-century naturalists. He is mad about chemistry, a passion he's had since he was a little boy, when he once threw trimethylamine over his mother's gefilte fish. "Have you ever smelt trimethylamine? Awful. She had to throw the whole lot away." And he's mad – absolutely potty – about ferns. Big ferns, little ferns, skinny ferns, fat ferns. Wispy ferns, stout ferns, happy ferns, sad ferns, ferns that think they're Diana Ross, ferns that suffer from dire PMT and get grumpy and go shoplifting. If it's a fern, Dr Sacks will fall for it, head-over-heels. Why? Why, Dr Sacks, when they can't... ahem... even be bothered to flower or fruit or anything?

It's because they're so primitive, he says, "and I'm attracted to the primitive in various ways. I prefer invertebrates to vertebrates, inorganic chemistry to organic, the sub-cortex to the cortex..." Favourite fern? "I'm very fond of tree ferns, of one sort or another. I have a New Zealand tree fern in my apartment, as well as four of five species of horsetails. I also like water ferns. It would be nice to have big, big tubs filled with water ferns and..." Enough on ferns, already! "I asked the hotel if I might have a fern for my room, and look what they've bought me." Um... a fern? "It's a palm!" I'm not sure I've impressed him as yet. I might even have rather depressed him. I think he will, perhaps, always think of me as The Woman Who Mistook A Palm For a Fern. He might even write me up in his next collection of clinical biographies. What will he name my condition, I wonder? Stupidity? No, doesn't sound scientific enough. Stupidititis, then? (Could I, even, become a member of the British Stupidititis Society? Or – if I may blow my own trumpet here – president, even?)

Whatever, Dr Sacks is wearing his "American Fern Society" T-shirt today, as well as Nike trainers and beige trousers. He is quite stout, quite rabbinical, and wears thick-lensed glasses. He has, it turns out, lots of different glasses for different purposes including a pair "made as indestructible as ophthalmic science will allow". These are his glasses for reading in bed. The thing is, he explains, he lives alone and has no one to remove them should they drop off. "So I often roll on my glasses in bed and break them." He can, indeed, be quite Professor Brainstorm-ish although whether this is just for effectI don't know. Currently, he is fretting about the train that he has to catch to Cambridge at 3pm. Is there such a train? Has it been booked for him? Does it really get in at 3.45pm?

He reminds me of an uncle of mine, a brilliant academic who finds the complicated easy, and the easy horrifically complicated. Is Dr Sacks like this? Perhaps a little. Although getting lost isn't so much his thing, it's more losing things. Back at his office in New York, he's banned from opening his own mail because of his propensity for accidentally tossing out cheques. He estimates that he has lost as many manuscripts as he has published. He seems wonderfully prone to mishap. Once, when he was doing research in this country, he dropped his lunch into a centrifuge, which rather ruined an otherwise good morning's work. Certainly, he brings out the Jewish mother in me – let me mend your pockets, Dr Sacks. Let me check the train times. Let me call the reception and give them hell for sending up a palm instead of a fern. What idiots, for getting them mixed up. They must be suffering from collective stupidititis. It must be epidemic down there! Is it something to do with the water, do you think? Have you had breakfast? (What am I suffering from now? Kvetchitis?)

His latest book is, in fact, a delight (he's a terrifically good writer) but might, frankly, be even more delightful to fellow fern fanciers. In short, I'm not sure it's quite up there with his most famous books, Awakenings (the story of 80 patients who lived in a catatonic state for decades after suffering from sleeping sickness, and were awakened by a drug) and, yes, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. This is a collection of clinical tales beginning with Dr P, a man so disordered in his senses that he mistook his foot for a shoe and tried to lace it, and who did indeed mistake his wife's head for a hat, trying to lift it off and put it on his own head. Some have had harsh things to say about Dr Sacks, actually. Someone once, even, suggested the book should be re-named The Man Who Mistook His Patients For a Writing Career, but I'm not sure that this is entirely fair. When I ask Dr Sacks if he ever regrets never having had children, he says: "In a way, I think of my books as children. And, if I can say this in a non-patronising way, I hope there is a parental relationship between my patients and myself. Have you seen Goodbye, Mr Chips? When Mr Chips is dying everyone says "poor chap, he never had any children" and he says: 'On the contrary, I've had thousands and thousands of children.' And I've had thousands and thousands of lives." I'm not sure intimacy is quite Dr Sacks's thing. As far as I can see, he has never had any kind of life companion. But, in a doctorly way, he may certainly grow to love his patients.

His patients, with their peculiar brains. The schizophrenic, the autistic, the Tourettes sufferers. Those with apraxia (inability to make purposeful movements), agnosia (inability to recognise objects) akethisia (fidgeting), and lack of proprioception (the ability to sense what the body is doing). He will insist he's a doctor, first and foremost. "If I see someone choking, I can do the Heimlich manoeuvre. On one occasion, I had a patient choking, grabbed a knife and did an emergency tracheotomy. So I will move fast if I have to." But his gift isn't, actually, in diagnosis, theory, treatment, cures. His gift is for biographising the clinical, describing the experiences of those whose synapses twist and turn in the most spectacularly irregular ways. I ask him if, by doing this, he hopes to show that such people are not ill, just experiencing the world in a different way. Perhaps, even, the problem is ours – what is normal, anyway? – rather than theirs. Absolutely, he says. He adds that he recently visited an American university, where a large part of the community is deaf "and one of them said to me: 'Instead of calling us hearing impaired, why don't you see yourself as sign impaired?'"

He has, he continues, an autistic friend, who would not wish to be cured even if it were possible. "She feels, rightly, that being autistic is part of who she is. Although she is very conscious of the disabilities that go with it – the difficulty of knowing people's expressions and what is going on in their minds – she is also very conscious of the positive aspects, her astonishing memory and very powerful visual imagery. It's very complicated, but I feel very strongly that deaf people who are born deaf are not sure they want cochlea implants. It's: 'Let me be and fuck off!' I think doctors might have too much impulse to pathologise and fix."

This, I say, is all very well, Dr Sacks, but what about you? I've read that you've been having psychoanalysis for the past 30 years, which does imply that you felt something in you needed fixing? True? "I needed to survive," he says, strangely. Did you sense that you were somehow ill-equipped for survival? "Well... hmm... I am dangerously accident prone. It's always one bloody thing or another. I think I learnt most of my anatomy through tearing most of my tendons. I've had major operations on this leg, that leg, this shoulder, this one... I was tearing myself to bits." So, you suspected a death wish at work? "I am really a little on the self-destructive side. None of my friends expected me to reach 30 let alone 40 and much less 50 and now I'm hard on 70, and I think it's due to my analyst, this sensible man who knows my unconscious better than myself. If it were conscious, it would be easier to deal with. But it's the unconscious, that sly sabotage from within."

And have you come to understand yourself better, after three decades of analysis? "A little. It's complicated. It's what Winston Churchill called the black dog. Are we going to get back to Oaxaca?" What to think about all this? Physician, heal thyself? Aren't psychoanalysis and neurology meant to be mutually exclusive? "No, there is a danger of psychiatrists not thinking of the nervous system and neurologists not thinking of the soul or mind. One has to think of both all the while." I think he would like us to think nothing of it. He might even like to say, I suspect: "Let me be. And fuck off!"

He was brought up in Cricklewood, north London. His father, Sam Sacks, was a GP who had once been houseman to Henry Head, one of Britain's seminal neurologists in the early part of last century. His mother, Elsie Landau came from a family strongly interested in science and mathematics. She became a surgeon, having been taught by Marie Curie, and wanted Oliver to take an interest in medicine, insisting that he watch her as she performed dissections on deformed babies. She was marvellously unsqueamish. When I ask Dr Sacks how he first learnt about the Holocaust after the war, he says: "When my mother took me to the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and showed me the Belsen heart, an adult human heart which had shrunk to the size of a small-dog's heart from starvation." Was your mother affectionate? "I think she was affectionate when she thought of it." So, distant then? He thinks she was only properly comfortable when she had a strictly defined, professional role. Doctor. Surgeon. And, yes, he accepts that he is rather the same.

I wonder what his Judaism means to him. Was he barmitzvah-ed? "Yes, but to me it was a sort of formal thing. It didn't mean anything to me; I did it to please my parents. My parents were orthodox in ritual but I've no idea what they believed. I am a non-believer. I like E M Forster's remark, 'I do not believe in belief.' " He was evacuated to a boarding school in Northamptonshire, where the headmaster was sensationally cruel and sadistic, and Oliver was beaten often and fiercely. Did you complain to your parents? "I didn't speak of it. I'm not actually able to speak out. I can speak out for others. I can speak out for my patients and defend them, but I cannot do so for myself. I partly saw the school as a punishment for some unimaginable crime." So you thought you deserved it? "Yes. I thought I was a bad little boy and therefore would be sent away and abandoned and beaten. The roots of neurosis go back very far." Indeed. And science must have seemed very reassuring after that. "Oh, yes. When I first saw the periodic table it filled me with a sense of revelation. These were the building blocks of the universe, and they have a wonderful mathematical order. Comforting? Immensely after the chaos, caprice and cruelty of boarding school. Human behaviour seemed to be very unpredictable, whereas chemistry was the opposite."

Anyway, time to go. Aside from anything else, he has a train to fret about. He's an interesting man, whose own interests range from the primitive fern to the sophisticated brain and who, perhaps, looks to both for clues on how to survive. Gosh, that was a big thought for me. Perhaps I should only seek vice presidency of the British Stupiditisis Society.

'Oaxaca Journal' is published by National Geographic Directions (£12.99)

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