The Good Doctor

I wouldn't be writing the kind of stories I write if it weren't for Oliver Sacks. In the time after university when I was struggling to find my voice and to know what kind of stories I wanted to tell, his work opened up a door inside my head.

In the world of Oliver Sacks, lines blur between the scientific and the spiritual, the body and the mind, the metaphor and the reality. It is a world in which the impossible can be described in dispassionate medical terms; in which the mundane functions of our bodies are shown up as wildly miraculous. He understood that wellness and illness are not just physical matters, but existential ones.

Much will be written elsewhere about his enormous intellect, his good humour, his endless curiosity, and his  compassion for his patients. I want to thank him for the gift of his wonderful stories; for proving, definitively, that there need be no divorce between the scientist and the artist. Doctor Sacks went in search of healing for the whole self.

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'We had something of infinite beauty and preciousness - and we lost it; we spend our lives searching for what we have lost; and one day, perhaps, we will suddenly find it, and this will be the miracle, the millennium.'

Photo: PBS.org