Oliver Sacks: His Own Life

Journalist Robert Krulwich explains that the storytelling abilities of neurologist Oliver Sacks had the significant effect of "storying people back into the world" – people who otherwise would have been isolated and overlooked by the rest of society because of their neurological challenges.

The physician and writer Oliver Sacks had a brother who started to experience psychosis as a young man. This experience was a great influence on Sacks, who would go on to devote his life to treating, documenting, and humanizing people with mental disorders.

The renowned physician and writer Oliver Sacks was known for his amazing empathy for other people. But his first “friends” as a child, as he described, were not people but numbers, minerals, metals, and plants. He loved these things throughout his life and even incorporated them into his wardrobe.