Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who set out to write about medical phenomena from a humanistic viewpoint. So, unlike with academic texts, he did not excise the ‘I’ – the personal – from his writing. On the contrary, in his books, Sacks often describes how he builds a rapport with his subjects and attempts to understand from the inside what it feels like to experience life with various conditions. Some facts I picked up from Hallucinations: (1) Oliver Sacks took a heap of drugs in the name of research early on in his career – to understand their effects, of course. (2) He says his doctor father could, upon entering a patient’s home, tell by his sense of smell only, some medical facts such as whether they were diabetic, but that, as his father aged, he lost this ability and had to rely on other diagnostic methods. (3) On blindness: some elements of the human seeing equipment gets bored when not used and so begins to fire its own messages off – these are perceived as hallucinations. (Charles Bonnet syndrome). Until diagnosed, the subjects sometimes think they are going mad. Charles Bonnet hallucinations have no relevance to events or issues in these people’s lives. As such they contrast with traumatic hallucinations, within which category “especially common are hallucinations engendered by loss and grief”. Sacks explores the aetiology of traumatic hallucination, both visual and auditory. There are similarities in effect between hypnotism and hallucination (and prayer, according to Sacks). Hallucinations is an incredibly informative, insightful read, written in a tone that is simultaneously forensic, insightful, compassionate, enquiring and always respectful of the patients he describes. You finish the book feeling, damn, I wished I’d know this guy, he’d have been a great friend.
