Sunday, August 30, 2015

On the death of Oliver Sacks: An adventurer and explorer – Tagesspiegel

20:26 clock From Jana Schlütter <- self.position: 1 -> <- classid: hcf center -> <- position: center -> <- text position: hcf text-left -> <- inisprint: false -> <- inhaspic: true ->

Oliver Sacks has more than any other describes how fragile our perception of reality is. Now he succumbed to his cancer.

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There’s probably nothing what would not have challenged the curiosity of this man. Even his own illness, his death, he observed a manner that is given to few people. As Oliver Sacks found out in January that his cancer had metastasized in the liver and those cancer cells love the liver, flashed through his head: “I also,” He went to a restaurant and ordered liver. When it was served, he commented: “It looks probably better than mine.” All he told the journalists of “Radiolab” a few months ago with a laugh in his voice. So when he amused himself – despite all the sadness – about yourself

Then he showed them a notebook.. Doctors had injected in spring countless beads in his right hepatic artery in order to starve the metastases, a grueling treatment that later gave him a respite. However, the dying cancer cells gave off chemicals that nebulized his brain for a short time. When the neurologist saw the effect, he began to write. The first page looked quite normal. On the second, the letters were shaky on the third he ran through a lot. Then the contents were confused, finally went over the words in scribbles. “Since I was delirious,” he said dryly. “Crazy, within ten minutes. If these pages are not a wonderful illustration on the subject? “For Oliver Sacks was all science, all loving observation of human existence. The essays, which he in the “New York Times” published in recent months, and his autobiography, he said his work one last case history added: their own. She is now at an end. Oliver Sacks died on Sunday in New York. He was 82 years old

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The neurologist and writer led a life full of contrasts. Lonely and sociable, taught and form-fitting, analytic and poetic, restrained and exuberant. While nothing human was alien to him otherwise, he spoke only in his autobiography “On the Move” about his homosexuality. Too deep was probably the injury that his Orthodox Jewish parents he inflicted when he told them that he would prefer boys. “You’re an abomination”, he threw his mother on the head. The set went with him long. He fell only four times, and always with a sense of shame.



Every night he exchanged his white coat against a motorcycle divide a

Oliver Sacks was on July 9, 1933, London born as the youngest son of two doctors. The scientific embossed family encouraged his curiosity, the parents patiently answered one thousand and one question. All the abandoned, the brothers felt when they were evacuated during the Second World War to protect them in a rural boarding school. The early separation was terrible, Sacks wrote. Presumably he had therefore problems with the three Bs: bonding, (build relationships, a sense of belonging and trust it) belonging and believing

Sacks became a doctor, his path was mapped out.. He studied at Oxford University Medicine, worked in hospitals in Middlesex and Birmingham. At 27, he broke out, traveled through America and found a job as a research assistant in San Francisco. Every night he exchanged his white coat against a motorbike gear, racing with his bike along the coast and joined by chance friendship with the Hell’s Angels. When he moved to Los Angeles, he was in turn to two very different groups: the neurologist at the University of California and the weightlifters from Muscle Beach. At the same time crept Sacks feel to afford anything significant. “The longing for meaning drove me in an almost suicidal addiction to amphetamines,” he wrote in the “New York Times”. He put the drugs until after he had one morning passionately debated with two friends at breakfast -. And then noticed that she did not exist

His career as a researcher failed initially, when he in 1965 to the Albert Einstein joined College of Medicine in New York. “Go! Go and take care of patients, because you can cause less “exclaimed his enervated superiors. Fortunately, followed sack the Council. Because as a neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, he met, among others on 80 victims of encephalitis lethargica, a sleeping sickness. “I was fascinated by my patient, she liked very much and felt something like a mission, to tell their stories. Stories of situations that no one knew and no one could imagine. . Neither the public nor my colleagues “Now she knows almost everyone – either from his book” Awakenings “or from the eponymous film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams show

smallest disturbances in the brain, such as. fragile is our perception of reality

The book made Oliver Sacks not only world famous, he had found his calling. While the medicine was always impersonal, the neurologist was the narrator and snatched an art from the 19th century of oblivion: the case history. Sacks describes not only the signs of disease, but the people with his suffering. And the brain show as an institution, in the smallest faults, how fragile is our perception of reality. “I see myself as a naturalist and explorer,” he wrote about his work.

He made the fates of his patients to short stories and wore “the clinical reality in all its diversity” in dozens of books together: “The man who his wife with a hat mistook”, “An Anthropologist on Mars “and” The one-armed pianist “are just some examples.

The stuff he never went out, year after year reached him tens of thousands of letters from patients and their relatives who sought his advice. Some of them he learned actually know some of what he told us, without pathos and yet touching. He was really none of his protagonists of ridicule, their dignity was him a valuable asset. Some of their peculiarities he observed also for yourself: For example, there were hallucinations, which can “see” his blinded eye bizarre things were and a faces-blindness, which made it difficult for him to associate a person’s name or recognize them

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“I’d like to see the sky, when I die”

The last case history was now his own. Earlier this year, he swam every day a mile he could at least displace for a short time, how close was his dying. Last death not an abstract concept more, but was constantly present. His muscles dwindled, constantly overwhelmed him a great weariness. Faced with this threat, he found solace in the chemistry and physics, saw in rocks small emblems of eternity, in the starry sky, a reminder of their own transience. “I’d like to see the sky, when I die,” he had said two longtime friends. “We push you out,” she assured him. One wishes him from the heart, that was true

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