NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
The medicine man Obs: What made you write Uncle Tungsten? OS: The immediate provocation was having a chemist-friend send me a parcel which contained a little bar of tungsten. When that fell out, the image of my uncle and his wing collar and his tungsten-blackened hands came to me. Obs: Was it difficult to write about your experiences at school? OS: The boarding school to which I was evacuated was very unpleasant and very traumatic. When I came back I had a violent need to find stability and order and clarity.
Obs: You found the order in the periodic table? OS: In chemistry generally, and the periodic table in particular. Actually, this has been bottled up in me for close to 60 years. Obs: Were you writing at school? OS: Ive kept journals since I was about 14 or so. Obs: Who did you read at that time?
OS: I was very fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Professor Challenger stories this great rambunctious zoologist with his enormous beard. HG Wells I adored. I knew all of his short stories. I was haunted by some of them. I still am. For me, London was flavoured by Wells, and Chesterton as well.
I loved The Napoleon of Notting Hill and Dickens. Obs: When did you make the move towards neurology? OS: Much later. First chemistry was the passion, then I wanted to be a zoologist.
Then a physiologist. Only when I was about 24 did I see that neurology would be my thing. In retrospect, I realise that it was probably destined from the start. Obs: You quote a school report which says Sacks will go far if he does not go too far. Are you a natural extremist? OS: Well, Im impulsive.
I think sometimes I push things too far as well. Obs: Do you think neurology satisfies that need to go a bit too far? OS: As a physician, I have to constrain this. I mustnt push a patient. I must remember that tact, delicacy is the crucial thing. There may be all sorts of questions I want to ask.
As an investigator one wants to go as far as possible, as a physician, the relationship with the patient is all-important. Obs: Are there other writers who influenced you to be the writer you are now? OS: I loved the Victorian naturalists like Wallace, Bates, and especially the Darwin of the Beagle. I loved Faraday's little book, The Chemical History of a Candle. Obs: You wrote journals when you were a teenager: when was it clear to you that you also wanted to write books? OS: I submitted some journals to a publisher in my early twenties.
They got rejected, and I didnt submit anything again. They were journals of my travels. The first book which made it was Migraine. That was an extreme delight.
Obs: Both your parents were given to telling medical stories. Did you inherit the writing gene from your mother or your father? OS: With my mother the stories were often more elaborate. I occasionally thought of her as a sort of ancient mariner, but both my parents were story tellers, and story telling is an essential part of medicine.
Obs: Are you a writer whos a neurologist, or a neurologist whos a writer? OS: I feel Im both, very deep inside me. In fact, Uncle Tungsten's about all sorts of things. I cant imagine myself either as a non-writer or non-neurologist. Theyre both conjoined parts of my identity now. Chekhov said: Literature is my mistress, but medicine is my lawful wedded wife.
Id never want to abandon medicine as Somerset Maugham did. Obs: You have described medicine as a romantic science. Do you think this means that medicine is best understood through literature? OS: All good novelists are good clinicians, and one feels this with Tolstoy or Dickens. Medicine is the point where biology and biography intersect, and I think one needs to have both the biological scientific impulse and the biographic narrative impulse. Obs: Who do you write for, apart from your patients?
OS: I sometimes regard a book as a letter to anybody whos interested. For me, the first act of writing is not for anybody, its for myself. Obs: What first took you to America? OS: I wanted space, novelty, freshness, and adventure. I think also perhaps wanting to get out of what I regarded as the rather rigid hierarchy of medicine in England. It was also the foolish vision of a classless society.
I somehow imagined America would be a democracy. Of course, its as class-ridden as England, but on the whole by money. Obs: Were you influenced by US writers? OS: I loved Moby Dick.
I was fascinated by the density of Faulkner, and the complexity, especially Light In August, Steinbeck and Hemingway. Obs: You describe yourself in the book as both shy and flamboyant. Do you think Americas a good place to be shy and flamboyant? OS: I dont think theres any place except maybe a nunnery or a monastery or something to be shy. But flamboyant, yes. Obs: Do you now find yourself happy to be away from your roots?
Presumably you have roots in America. OS: I dont know whether I have roots anywhere. I need to come back to London, to home base, every so often. Obs: You do say strongly that youre anti-Zionist. OS: When I was very young I didnt have any particular feelings on Zionism. I dont know that my parents did until after the war and after the Holocaust, when they felt that there should be a Jewish national state.
Obs: Do you share that view? OS: Yes, although its tricky, because equally there needs to be a Palestinian state and thats a lot of people in a small place. Obs: Neurology must expose you to the mysterious side of the brain. OS: People can be afraid about neurology and neuro-science. They see it as unweaving the rainbow and removing the spirit.
Chemical and electric currents are finally what it talks about. I dont think there are any states of mind that are not states of the brain, and I cannot imagine disembodied mind, or spirit. But I think the wonder of our aesthetic or religious sense, or musicality, is increased by the fact that it depends on three pounds of jelly in our head. Obs: Do you believe in God? OS: Sorry? Obs: Do you believe in God?
OS: I thought you said did I have a dog! No. Im an old Jewish atheist, whatever one means by this. I dont know whether I ever believed.
Ive never been able to imagine any sort of personal god, but I think one wants to say theres a divine order and beauty about the world. Obs: That seems implicit in the book. OS: There is beauty and order everywhere, but it doesnt mean theres any agent behind the beauty and the order. I cant imagine any transcendent entity. Having said that, I work in both orthodox Jewish and orthodox Catholic hospitals, and I enjoy seeing religious faith and religious practice in its best form.
I have a sympathy for it. Obs: Were you ever tempted to write a portrait of your parents and family that was less affectionate than the one youve actually put into this book? OS: Yes, indeed. I think I spent 50 years or more trying to understand and to resolve and reconcile some of my complex feelings there. Obs: You say somewhere that your parents were more sensitive to the sufferings of their patients than their children. Do you hold that against them?
OS: I think that was the case. But its partly a book of reconciliation and of understanding. Its almost impossible for us to criticise people of another time and generation under constraints and impulsions we cant imagine. But yes, I could have put things more strongly. Obs: Are there things that were left out? OS: Oh, of course.
Obs: Dark things, angry things? OS: Theres been an extreme selection. At one point the manuscript was over two million words. Now the book is 100, 000, so 95 per cent has been left out. Obs: Whats next? OS: I have a little book which will be out next spring just a journal of a visit to Mexico, with members of the American Fern Society.
Beyond that, I want to write a book on ageing. Obs: Do you feel yourself to be on the edge of old age? OS: I am on the verge or over the verge. Id also like to publish a book of un elaborated case histories. Ive kept my notes, tens of thousands of notes, for the last 40 years.
Obs: So no shortage of material? OS: I used to be afraid about 10 years ago that I was running out of material, but now Ive found so many of the interests of my earlier life coming up. So I can write about botany and chemistry as well. &# 183; A televised version of this interview will be shown on Arts world this afternoon at 6 pm. Available on Sky Digital Channel 199.
To subscribe call 08705 900 700. &# 183; Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933. He is the author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. He now lives in New York.
Free research essays on topics related to: ive, journals, neurology, periodic table, imagine
Research essay sample on Os I Dont Os I Loved Obs
