That’s a fair description of what can happen to readers of
Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, a book
about the catatonic, post-encephalitic patients Dr. Sacks treated at Mt. Carmel
hospital when he went there as a young neurologist in 1966. We readers dive in because both author and book are so widely
acclaimed (ten other well-received books and countless articles and lectures
from Sacks; a movie and various stage plays from the book.)
Like the bee, we find lots to feed on: several prefaces and
forewords as the book has gone through different editions. A twenty-five-page
prologue. And then the heart: The compelling stories of twenty patients who
awoke from their long sleep (brought on by encephalitis) after being
administered L-Dopa (one of the very
early psychotropic meds). In this section, there are surely as many lines of
footnotes as of body. And they aren’t necessarily boring footnotes that the
reader wants to skip.
Then there is a forty-page riff, in a section called Perspectives, on how illness fits into
Western culture, history, philosophy, and literature. And a thirty-five-page
epilogue to the 1982 edition and a brief postscript to the 1990 edition. Plus eighty
pages of appendices (an interesting series of essays/papers that has an “Oh,
and everything else interesting on
the subject . . .” feel to it).
Followed by a glossary (useful for medical terms), a bibliography, and an index.
In the middle of the book is an inset of haunting
photographs of Mt. Carmel patients caught in catatonic sleep and their poignant
awakenings. There are also clips from the media: Sleepy Sickness Spreading: Fatal Cases: Hunt for Elusive Germ: 20,000
Cases Last Year: Epidemic Worst In Britain and Italy: Record Death Toll.
That’s why the reader comes out sated. A little over-fed.
Stunned. Sacks was (he died this year) a brilliant neurologist and a deeply
compassionate physician. He had the imagination and audacity to experiment with
new chemistry and awaken catatonic patients; he had the sorrow of watching them
eventually regress and suffer and die.
Perhaps one reason Sacks has been so embraced as a person,
physician, and writer is that he felt the humanity
of illness. In the section called Perspectives,
he writes “Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our
character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s
character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within
worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together
and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”
In our current specialized, assembly line, code-for-payment
medical industrial complex, who can help but feel nostalgia for that humanity? — Sharelle Moranville
