Popular neurology… what else do we need!
Oliver Sacks needs no introduction. He heralded a new generation and a fresh breed of neurologists who realised that every neurological problem, whether of deficits, excesses or something else, could not be hoped to be understood in a purely mechanistic way. Yes there are neurons in the brain, but understanding neurological disorders isn’t simply knowing which neuron does what, and then finding the anomalies in a diseased mind.
There is an inescapable need of understanding the persona, the personality, the person. It is important to step into his shoes and understand how he experiences the world, how he perceives and interprets and reacts to the world. In the absence of this approach, even attitude, one will only end up attaching a label on him and failing in one’s duty of providing any real help.
Sacks’ writing is filled with compassion, no less because that is how he interacted with his patients – seeing them as real human beings with crippling mental deficiencies and inefficiencies and not merely as a dysfunctional human body. He could feel their pain, their suffering, their loneliness and I think this helped him in improving their lives, even if a cure wasn’t possible. He repeatedly notes, during the course of the book, that patients must be observed in their natural surroundings – not in the hospital or the care centre – as only then can we see them in their true selves.
It can be difficult for the, for lack of a better term, neurologically sound person to understand what it feels like to have a neurological disorder. These aren’t the kind of problems you can imagine and get a grasp of. If we see people who have lost one or more of their limbs, we feel sympathy, but also empathy – we can imagine what it might mean to not have an arm or a leg.
But this is not the case in a neurological disorder. We cannot even imagine what the afflicted person is going through. Thus, sympathy is all we can offer. Empathy we can’t.
But do they need sympathy? No.. They need understanding and just a little bit of encouragement.
In the course of the many stories which fill the pages of this beautiful, humanist endeavour, there come sentences which touch your core. You stop being merely a reader and become a participant of the therapeutic process itself, even though, displaced in time and space, you cannot effect anything.
In the chapter discussing the titular case, Sacks hands to the patient, simply named Dr. P, a rose and asks him to explain what he sees. Now, Dr. P is suffering from visual agnosia, or the inability to recognise an object from its visual form. So he can see everything that we see, but he lacks the faculty of realising what the object really is.
Dr. P says “It is a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment”. When Sacks asks him to smell it, he quips, “An early rose! What a heavenly smell!”
Such tragicomic moments are common throughout the book, as the reader comes face to face with conditions he had never even thought could exist.
Sacks writes splendidly. His choice of words often lift up the narrative by a few notches, driving home both the debilitating and invigorating aspects of the case in question. Having said that, however, I found myself frequently referring to the dictionary to understand the medical terms that were being used. I have to admit that Sacks often doesn’t explain terms, terms which the non-specialist might be hearing for the first time. But, to be fair to Sacks, he probably chose this in order to maintain the organic cohesiveness of the cases discussed, which could have been marred in an effort to explain the terms at the same time.
Why do we read books? It is to come across works such as these that open up entire universes for us. I knew how incredible the human machine, especially the human brain, is, but did I have any clue about the kind of problems that can possibly arise in the process of a human coming into being? No! And yet, I know much more than what I knew one month back.
It is books like these that bring a smile within me, and make me want to hold those who don’t read books, by their shoulders and tell them, “This is what you are missing!”