Happy Birthday, Good Dr. Sacks

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Hey, I'm Lotf Nasser, this is radio lab. This week would have been the 91st birthday of a person who, I think it's fair to say, is one of the show's all-time favorite human beings. The late neurologist and science writer Dr. Oliver Sacks. We had spoken to Oliver Sacks many, many times on this show and his essays about his patients, most famously Awakenings. And the man who mistook his wife for a hat. They are a model for what we like to do around here, the mix of science and heart and curiosity. So today, what we're going to do for you is to play you. A conversation that one of our other all-time beloved humans, Robert Crawlwitch, had with Dr.

Mr. Crawlwitch is here.

I asked him, Would you mind sitting down and talking to me about how you got started? and he said, Well, all right. The truth is, though, my start wasn't all that easy. In fact, it was kind of rough.

I came to New York in 65.

He wasn't planning to write essays about science, not at all.

I wanted to be a real scientist.

The kind that does experiments in a lab, and he had a research position at Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, working with....

Worms, earthworms, Right? earthworms, oh.

How many all together?

Tens of thousands.

The thing about worms is when you give them a little poke, you give them a little.

They have very quick reactions, throttle reactions, when they curl up.

They react faster than people do. And he wondered, well, why? So he decided to focus on the wrappers that surround their nerve cells, which are made from a very thin substance called myelin. So thin you have to peel it off really delicately.

One is looking for a little amount of myelin in their giant nerve fibers, maybe a thousandth of the weight of each worm.

So you're digging up lots of earthworms, but how do they die?

Well, I don't want to be pressed on that point.

Oh, come on, give me a little....

We sort of anesthetize them and put them out.

Until very gradually, he accumulated a precious ball of myelin that he could then take to a laboratory to experiment with. Of course, like any good scientist, he also took notes.

I kept fairly detailed notes in a huge green notebook, my lab notebook. At that time, I lived here in the West Village, I had a motorbike and I went in daily to Einstein and the Bronx. I sometimes took the book home at night to ponder over, but one morning, when I was in a bit of a hurry, I failed to secure it properly to the motorbike.

The Cross Bronx Expressway can get very, very busy.

Very busy, very crowded, very fast, very callous drivers who instead of respecting this notebook, this holy notebook of mine, were tearing it sheet from sheet I. On two occasions I made little sallies to try and get into the traffic, but this would have been fatal and so I lost my notebook. I mean, for all the data that you had collected from all of these, it had nine months data in it.

With his little ball of precious myelin.

And sort of make further results. Although then there was another and even worse accident, which is I lost the specimen of myelin, which I spent nine months getting.

And I mean, the thing that you pulled out of all these many animals, how did you lose it?

I don't know what happened to it, I'm afraid I am a loser. And then the powers that be got together and basically in a very kind but firm way. They said. Sax, you're a menace. Go see patients, you'll do less harm.

So no more lab work for you.

No more lab work for me, and the rest is history.

So now, instead of a scientist in a lab, Oliver is assigned to what's basically a nursing home.

The original name had been the Beth Abraham Home for Incurables.

Now it was just Beth Abraham Hospital up in the Bronx.

Some of my contemporaries said, You know, this is the sticks. No ambitious doctor would, you know, would work in a place like this. But I found it perfectly to my liking because I could spend a great deal of time with patients.

Though, on the day that he arrived, as he stepped into the lobby, he looked around for the first time. And he thought to himself, like, what is going on here? Because everywhere he looked, he saw people.

Some in chairs, some standing.

Totally still like frozen. And though he didn't know this yet, these folks would become yet another accident. Or maybe I should call it a collision between Oliver and the science community. One that would be much more painful than getting exiled from the lab. But this time, he would stand his ground and he'd fight.

Yes, right.

Oliver's frozen patients had gotten sick back in the 1930s from a fever called encephalitis lethargica. They'd survived the disease, but it left them, as one doctor put it.

As extinct volcanoes in whom there was very little behavior and very little sign of mind of an interior.

They'd been stuck at Beth Abraham ever since.

And it seemed in 1966, when I went there, that there was no hope or no future for them.

But then, one year into his new job, a paper came out that said large doses of a chemical called L-dopa.

L-dopa levodihydroxyphilalanalene.

Seemed to help parkinsonians unfreeze a little bit, and Sachs thought, Well, who knows, maybe they could help my patients.

It was a hunch.

So he wrote the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, asking for a supply of L-Dopa so he could run a study. If you've seen the movie, you know what happens next.

Dr. Sayre.

What is it? It's a miracle for the patients with L-Dopa. The changes were, to put it, mildly dramatic. Where are my glasses? They're on your face.

Well, I was seeing people become alert, attentive to their surroundings, able to move and able to feel in a way they hadn't been able to for, sometimes decades. Anthony, how are you?

Great man.

How are you great, too? All right, then?

Some of these changes Oliver could see and measure, but to get a fuller sense of what was happening, he wondered. What was it like on the inside to suddenly walk and talk and feel after so long?

Wonderful, wonderful.

Said a patient he called Hester, who in one weekend burst out of a 30-year silence.

I'm a new person, I feel it, I feel it inside, I'm a brand new person, I feel so much.

He gave his patients diaries and he told them, Well, tell me what you're feeling and experiencing again. Here's Hester.

I feel very good, my speech is getting louder and clearer, my hands and fingers move more freely. I can even take the paper off a piece of candy, which I haven't done for years. The following day, she wrote Anyone who reads this diary will have to excuse my spelling and my writing.

The government, of course, wanted to know what had happened as well, and they asked Oliver to report what he'd observed on what were called.

Rating forms.

Basically, they were charts, so if a patient shook less, Oliver was to mark that change checking a box.

On a seven-point scale.

So his shakes went from a six to a four. Then, you know, just check the box. Numbers were key.

That was what they expected, what they demanded.

And that was enough for them.

That would have been enough for them.

But not for Oliver, he had seen so much that wouldn't even begin to fit on a seven-point inventory. He said. I'm not doing this.

And I then stopped keeping these rubbishy inventories.

Because they didn't say enough. But as a researcher, as a scientist, he still had to report what had happened. Which was a problem because in the 1960s, medical journals had an attitude about clinical studies. They also wanted numbers and patterns and data, they wanted things that you could measure, they didn't want stories.

Phenomenological description, if you want to put it this way, had been largely displaced by laboratory tests of one sort or another.

Meaning adjectives and adjectives and numbers.

The urea was so-and-so, the chest x-ray so-and-so, and the more human sorts of description had become rarer.

A hundred years earlier, in the 1870s, doctors did quote patients and did describe scenes in their clinical studies.

Many of the 19th century accounts are vivid and descriptive.

But as medical machines got better, numbers became more reliable, gradually pushing out description, with one very singular exception his name was....

A. R. Luria.

Dr. A. R. Luria was a neurologist living in Moscow in the 1960s. He still did case studies the old-fashioned way.

Yes, so much so that I read the first 20 pages of this, thinking it was a novel. And I then realized that it was a case history, but the most extraordinary in detail I had ever read. But a case history which did not shy away from the human aspects and the pathos and drama. And then, in 1967, I read a book....

Also by Dr. Luria.

Called human brain and psychological processes.

This is the book you are holding in your hand.

The book I'm holding at the moment, or I should say another copy of the book, yes. When I read the book, I got appalled or frightened and awed by its power and its depth and its narrative sweetness.

Wait a second, Oliver. I thought this man is doing exactly what I want to do, and suddenly he was jealous. And maybe more than a little competitive, because this guy was doing it so well.

And I thought this man has seen it all, he's writing, he has thought it all out in detail. Sooner or later, he will see and think and write everything I can. Therefore, there will be no place for me in the world. Luria will have done it all.

And so, both frightened and boosted by Luria's example, Oliver Sacks sits down and he writes his manuscript for awakenings. And following Luria's example, he wrote it as vividly as he possibly could, with quotes, with scenes, with emotions. The book came out in 1974. And what happened?

Well, when Awakenings was published, many essayists and poets and others liked it very much.

That's w.

And it was selected as book of the year by five writers. On the other hand, there were no medical reviews. Whatever, none, none.

Well, to be fair, one small journal ran an editorial.

Saying that, among the most surprising things the previous year were the appearance of this extraordinary book. And quote the strange mutism, unquote of the profession.

The Strange Mutism.

Yes, the strange mutism.

As in silence.

Yes, as in silence.

This isn't science. Some neurologists said. This is anecdote. Awakenings is not useful, it's overwritten. Where's the data?

One of the most painful was from a man who said Sachs is the doctor who mistook his patients for literary career.

Oh, the science community almost unanimously ignored awakenings. But in the middle of this quiet, out of the blue, a letter arrived at Oliver's house.

From Moscow. It excited me. It had beautiful handwriting, done, obviously with a fountain pen.

He opened it, and it was from the man himself, a.

He said The art of description, common to the great neurologists and psychiatrists of the 19th century, is almost gone now. And he went on to say that awakenings could be revived, and with a great success.

Okay, folks, we are going to revive to great success after this short break.

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This week, on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll talk with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Her new book is called The Art of Power. I'm guessing you've read Machiavelli in your life, and even more than that.

You're just saying that because I'm Italian. Yeah, yeah.

I got it.

Nancy Pelosi on The New Yorker Radio Hour.

From WNYC Studios.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. We are listening to Robert Kral, which interviewed the late great Dr. Oliver Sacks about how he tripped and stumbled into becoming a brilliant science writer. When we left for a break, Dr. Sacks had just described receiving a letter of praise from another doctor writer, one whom he very much looked up to.

That letter, Luria's letter, plus the response from poets and playwrights and movie makers, gave Oliver the boost he needed to double down and begin writing book after book after book. In his new but old style, he wrote stories about husbands who mistook their wives for haths, colorblind painters, deaf people, touretters, autistic people, blind people. His descriptions in all these books are so full of feeling, he makes these people come alive, this is his legacy. Oliver Sacks is a great includer.

I would now say that the description was inadequate. And I think, for example, that even with ordinary Parkinson's disease, to give an adequate description of how someone with Parkinson's rises from a chair and makes his difficult way across a room.

Come on, what is a regular neurologist going to do with 50 pages about a sneeze? How's he going to use that?

Well, you might indeed be able to use it. Let me give an example.

50 pages on a sneeze. You've just gone from useful to Proust, there's a line here and you've just crossed it. This is literary, this is no longer medical writing for doctors.

Well, I try to be, and I believe I am a good doctor, and a doctor does not just diagnose a disease. That is the least he has to do that, but it's the least of what he does. He is also concerned with the impact of the disease on the person, the experience of it, and how they may adapt or otherwise, how they may respond to treatment. So there is quite a strong individual story to be said of everyone with a disease or an injury.

No, but how far do you expand it? Because you already have millions of readers? Your stories have enormous influence, you're loved. The only question that dangles here is, What have you done for doctors?

Well, I think things have changed. At first, there was this strange mutism, especially among senior doctors, though I think junior doctors might sometimes have a copy of Awakenings with a brown paper cover.

Okay, so let me just do this. I have one last question. I'm still going to be channeling your doctor critics. This being your birthday, I feel it's something I should do. So if you were to get sick this afternoon and have to call a doctor and we'll just say the name of this doctor happens to be Dr.

Well, it would depend what I had.

What did you want to tell the captain?

We said to the captain we think this woman is bleeding in her brain. This caused the seizure and this is also causing pressure in the head and the pupil, and she must be in neurosurgical hands as quickly as possible. The captain said Okay, and he emergently landed at Denver. The woman was taken off the plane. She was successfully operated on and she thanked us both.

Now, which Dr. sacks, which of the two should get the lion's share of the credit?

Well, we did it together.

But notice that he told it fantastically.

That was the late the Great Dr. Oliver Sacks. If you're interested in reading more of his work, we recommend literally any of his books and countless essays. So good. Although I really loved an anthropologist on Mars and then I was a sucker for his autobiography on the move.

Yeah, it's also fun to read his book, Awakenings, and then watch the movie, with Robin Williams playing him.

And we also, we have tons of episodes with Dr. Sacks talking about his life, his patients, just Google Radiolab and Dr. Oliver Sacks. And so many will pop up. And that's it for today.

Live your best life. And part of that, obviously, is tuning in again next week.

Hi, I'm Rianne and I'm from Dunegal in Ireland.

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Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soreen Wheeler.

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Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, A Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Capital Ideas podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

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