Oliver Sacks Put Himself into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
> The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
TLDR
> after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.
AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title.
From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.
Its shocking how bad some writers are these days.
This was just a slog that I felt went nowhere and the points were buried in between rambling information about Sacks and his gay lifestyle, lovers and living in NYC and the gay lifestyle there at the time.
Not only was it not interesting, it was poorly written and hard to read. Sometimes writers just need to stick to the facts instead of trying to write another "The Phenomenology of Spirit" for a "middlebrow magazine".
Long form journalism is not a common thing anymore, men (who dominate HN) are not enthusiastic readers anymore, and the cultural conversation that a dead-tree magazine represents is no longer amplified in mass media (as opposed to an era when David Frost and Dick Cavett had primetime shows on TV).
I don't disagree about the reverse snobbery, but IMO people being "not equal to the challenge" isn't the actual problem.
It's the equivalent of those people on Reddit or social media in general who make fun of three-star Michelin restaurants.
I get that sometimes you just want McDonald's, and I don't think there is a definition of better and worse in either of these contexts that doesn't require injecting some kind of taste. But nonetheless.
Editors edit for an audience, and HN is definitely not a perfect match for the New Yorker's intended audience.
But most readers of the New Yorker would choke on the kind of stuff that is perfectly aligned with HN's audience, so...
The first sentence too is apt, "butter colored suit that reminded him of the sun" is a great example of Sacks' writing style.
> Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.”
[...]
> Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze.
[...]
> “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?”
> “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds.
> “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”
I also don't agree with your interpretation of what the article is trying to paint Sacks as, though of course you are entitled to it.
I think the the point of the article is to articulate what Sacks himself said:
> "As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”"
I was once at a small dinner talk by a well-respected headache specialist, surrounded by a dozen neurologists. He asked, "How many here have chronic headaches?" Every hand went up except mine and the drug rep's.
Also a very notable statistic/anecdote at the end. I don't know how wide the scope (only one university?), but about a third of the incoming neurology students chose the field because of Oliver Sacks.
I always found the bulk of the criticism leveled against him to be faulty. However, if he did indeed fabricate a lot of details - it is concerning.
> Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.”
and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this.
The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.
what exactly was I supposed to find and see people believe?
Anyway sorry I didn't keep track of the pages I visited, but here are some of the search results I see now, indicating at least some time wasted exploring something that did not need to be explored if it had been clear that the story was not fully real:
- https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/twins....
- https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/yamaguchi.htm
- https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and... (pretty good article!)
- https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-0... (mention by Granville!)
- https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/09/possibly-re...
- https://www.discovermagazine.com/oliver-sacks-and-the-amazin...
- https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/prime-numbers-mental-calcula...
BTW the same account of the twins (https://archive.is/MmogP) also has several paragraphs revealing major misunderstandings on the part of Sacks, e.g.:
> And yet they are called “calendar calculators”—and it has been inferred and accepted, on next to no grounds, that what is involved is not memory at all, but the use of an unconscious algorithm for calendar calculations. When one recollects how even Carl Friedrich Gauss, at once one of the greatest of mathematicians, and of calculators too, had the utmost difficulty in working out an algorithm for the date of Easter, it is scarcely credible that these twins, incapable of even the simplest arithmetical methods, could have inferred, worked out, and be using, such an algorithm.
[Needless to say, calculating the day of the week for a fixed date is a much easier and completely unrelated problem to that of Easter, “the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon (a mathematical approximation of the first astronomical full moon, on or after 21 March” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter ]
>https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310
>"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."