Dr. Sacks, CBE is a world famous neurologist. He is the youngest born to a North London Jewish couple. Samuel Sacks, his father, is a physician and his mother, Muriel Elsie Landau is one of the first female surgeons in England. Sacks has been practicing neurology in New York since 1965. He has been writing books about his experiences, and what mind blowing experiences they have been since 1970.
Sacks’ writing makes you interested in both the disease and the person infected by it. He recounts riveting cases with a compassionate and thoughtful manner. He is definitely a doctor with an excellent bedside manner.
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales. The cases are drawn from Sacks’ medical practice. In these fascinating and unusual cases, Sacks introduces the reader to real people who suffer from a variety of neurological problems. The title comes from the case of a man who lost the intuition related to vision. He recognizes abstract images but not faces or common objects.
Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain was featured on the PBS series Nova “Musical Minds”. I found it amazing to watch the brain changes of Sting when he was listening to or composing music in the MRI. Sacks is an honorary medical advisor for the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function(IMNF). This institution has awarded him its Music Has Power Award in 2000 and 2006.
Sacks writing is very much readable non-fiction. Hopefully you might find his writings as amusing and fascinating as I do.
Other Sacks titles you may enjoy are:
Seeing Voices: a journey into the land of the deaf.
An Anthropologist on Mars: seven paradoxical tales.
Uncle Tungsten: memories of a chemical boyhood
