Oliver Sacks didn’t just look at the brain. He looked at the whole person, he told KUOW in a 1987 interview.
"One should never just look at diseases or disorders, but how it is for the whole person,” he said. “The person is always struggling to survive and to manage some way or another.”
Most neurologists tended toward the scientific, he said, focusing exclusively on the hardware of the brain, rather than what that meant for the individual.
“There's always a person there as well, a predicament and a plight, and a world and a plea,” he said. “I think there's a danger of neurology getting too high tech.”
Sacks, who died this weekend at 82, was best known for his nonfiction about neurological disorders. His books – among them, "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" – touched on individual cases.
The stories were mysteries of a sort, as Sacks tried to understand what ailed the individual. In some cases, he found that medicine didn’t help. Or that it helped alleviate a certain symptom, but numbed the individual.
"The chemistry may not be enough,” he said. “For example, with the patients I described in 'Awakenings,' who had been immobilized for decades, it wasn’t sufficient to be animated when they came to. There had to be a life to lead, a life of meaning and feeling and sense."
He said some patients developed a certain power to accommodate their disability. People believe that the blind have preternaturally good hearing and touch, he said, but that wasn’t true.
“Their powers of hearing and touch are no better than normal, but they used much better. They're used to the limit,” he said.
The man who mistook his wife for a hat couldn’t see faces, for example. So he came to know his doctor by his beard and glasses.
“He was using left brain function to make up for some defects,” Sacks said.
It wasn’t that he opposed to medicine – or even high tech, he said. But there’s so much we don’t know. Which is why he read 19th century books on medicine. A particular favorite was a book on migraines, written in the 1860s. He said it might be the best book on the issue.
"We're determined by our brains, but we determine our brains," he said.