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Straight From the Heart
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10973 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1986 |
1,778 Words |
| Author
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Ruth Jamison
Ruth Jamison is a psychologist in private practice in
Washington, D.C. She is currently involved in work with
victims of AIDS. Her forthcoming book is Intimacy and
Alienation. |
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a seductive book, beautifully written by a vigorous and romantic neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks. In addition to being an author, Dr. Sacks is a professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and teaches occasionally at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He had a full-time clinical practice for twenty years.
In a telephone interview by Daniel Goleman, Sacks said, "I have no literary aspirations and don't regard myself as a writer. But I find that I need to convert the human spirit to written language. I always have pen in hand; I fill endless notebooks that I don't even look at myself. And I calculate I write nearly a million words a year in patient notes alone. The task of making sense of what a patient presents leads me to a powerful need to make a narrative." Hence the clinical tales.
All of his stories are about his patients who have suffered some sort of severe neurological problem.
Dr. Sacks' concern is not only with the disease itself, how to find it, understand it, examine it, describe it, but how to deal with it in ways that will not discount the person who contains the disorder--to respect the patient's continuing emotional, intellectual, and creative capabilities.
In his efforts to achieve his goals Dr. Sacks deliberately writes his case histories in a narrative style fashioned after the nautrualists' design of the nineteenth century. He uses highly articulate and descriptive language in order to present a distinct picture of his patients'
... (1996 of 10293 Characters)
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