Oliver Sacks, the neurologist with the soul of a humanist, dies

Oliver sacks, famous neurologist and renowned author of books such as "The Man who mistook his wife for a hat" or "Awakenings", Died yesterday, August 30, 2015, at 82 years of age. Sacks had already announced in February of this year that he was in the terminal stage and that he had only a few months to live. The world thus loses one of the best scientific popularizers.

A death announced but equally mourned among the entire scientific community

Sacks leaves us a legacy of inestimable quality in the form of popular literature on the functioning of the organs to which we owe the possibility of thinking, seeing and feeling. His dissertations about what he was investigating are almost indistinguishable from the parts in which he narrates experiences and reflections in situ.

This is reflected in the way he writes, direct and accessible to all audiences, not exempt by it of philosophical questions that are outlined so that it is the reader who tries answer them. But the quality of Oliver Sacks goes far beyond his knowledge of neurology and his ease of speech to communicate easily fascinating and complicated ideas and concepts, or his way of posing intellectual challenges to motivate the reader and make them want to know more.

The vocation for the study of the human being is not the only thing that is reflected in his writings: he also does it, in a somewhat more veiled but equally manifest, his heart of humanist, a force that moved him to love and appreciate the subjective, the private, the emotional and the phenomenological, what belongs to the people he studied and what he could never have accessed as scientific.

Beyond scientific laws

Throughout his work, Oliver Sacks gave us many great examples of how to talk about disorders and illness with total respect for the patient. In the literature of which he is the author, people who could be considered insane are portrayed with total humanity.

He did not write as if he dissected incomplete beings or absolutely different from the rest: men eccentrics, women with unusual problems, but never people separated from humanity by a gap impassable. Oliver Sacks talks about these people to show how the human body works: what makes us equal, what works differently. in the same way in each one of us, without taking our eyes off the particularity of each human being but without emphasizing the differences.

That is why his books are possibly the best way to learn about psychiatric illness and the rules that govern our life. brain without looking away from what makes us capable of feeling, loving and experiencing. The human quality that the literature written by Oliver Sacks exudes is difficult to find in the scientific dissemination, and even less in that which talks about the motor of our emotions and thoughts.