I never quite understood the biochemistry of it all, but I felt as though I did. It was his friends who kept telling him that something was wrong.Īs Sacks explained, Dr P suffered from a condition known as face blindness - a condition Sacks analysed for his lay readers with his own genial brand of erudition. Strangely, Dr P did not seem to be worried by his peculiar relationship with the rest of the world. In fact, when Sacks called on the man at home, Dr P made a move to shake hands with his own grandfather clock. The odd thing about Dr P was that he was unable to distinguish faces. Oliver Sacks' partner Bill Hayes took a series of intimate portraits in their New York apartment. The muddled man of the title was an extremely engaging music teacher named Dr P. Sacks stepped into the spotlight in 1973 with a book called Awakenings, in which he explained how he had 'woken up' a group of patients who had been sent into a decades-long sleep by a malfunction in their nervous systems.īut, like thousands of people throughout the Anglosphere, I discovered him through his bestselling book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), in which Sacks shared a series of astonishing stories about his patients and their aberrant relationships with the wider world. He was a neurologist who treated people whose brains malfunctioned in usual and sometimes distressing ways. The cosmos that fed the childlike wonder of Sacks was the human brain.

Whatever their discipline, they are all players in the same epic drama - they speak of the human animal facing the wonder of the cosmos.Īll believe that this cosmos is knowable - that our silent awe is expanded by the even greater miracle of human understanding. One after another, they have addressed us on TV with their takes on civilisation and the triumph of reason. Later members are the historians Simon Schama and Bettany Hughes, and the physicist Brian Cox. His generation included the medico and theatre director Jonathan Miller, the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, the mathematician Jacob Bronowski and the naturalist David Attenborough.

Oliver Sacks was an honorary member of that exclusive club I like to think of as the Wise English Prophets.

Oliver sacks 1973