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Oliver Sacks was a brilliant neurologist and author who engaged with his patients with profound empathy and care. For Sacks, his patients were not just cases to be examined, but human beings to be understood on many different levels. His unique approach to medicine included a literary component. Much of his published work was innovative at the time and remains invaluable today. His books and essays often include reflections on life, death, and everything in between, urging readers to live all of life's experiences.
In this gallery, we share some of his reflections on the meaning of life. Click through to find out more.
The late neurologist and author Oliver Sacks certainly left a profound legacy in both fields and, in many ways, was able to create a bridge between the two.
A humanist who viewed his patients through their experiences and struggles, Sacks’ writing is deeply poetic and moving.
In the time leading up to his death, Sacks penned a reflective piece for the New York Times, sharing that he lived his life with “violent enthusiasm” and “extreme immoderation in all his passions.”
The intensity with which he lived his life and the manner in which he was able to speak about his experiences, knowing his life was soon to end, continues to offer readers inspiration.
Sacks’ childhood was very difficult. Growing up in England, his family was separated due to the violence of World War II. His brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and suffered debilitating symptoms.
Sacks’ interest in neuroscience began with his brother’s condition. His deeply empathetic approach to his patients’ experiences was, too, rooted in memories of his brother’s experiences.
In his first book, 'Migraine,' Sacks spent extensive time with his patients, breaking through stigmas by documenting their experiences in an attempt to reach new depths in terms of understanding diseases and death.
The uniqueness of each human being is something that drew Sacks to his patients. He stated: “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever.”
To Sacks, in life and death, no human being could replace another. He argued that the void that exists after a person has departed is the fate of us all.
His compassion and curiosity drove him to examine the meaning of life, but also to understand it "backwards." To Sacks, our inevitable death should inform how we live by determining what makes life worth living.
In his book ‘Letters,’ Sacks describes himself as “a philosophical physician,” “an astronomer of the inward,” and a “neuropathological Talmudist.”
Sacks stated in a letter to philosopher Hugh Moorhead that, “I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again.”
For Sacks, life is a series of experiences in which we are continuously “inspired by things or events or people” and engage in a constant state of rediscovery of self.
Sacks references how the experience of reading poetry, listening to Mozart, or witnessing others’ selfless acts are some of the “inspiring” things that aid in re-achieving a sense of life’s meaning.
Sacks notes that it is a “sense of hope,” despite life’s circumstances, that informs the meaning of life. He refers to this as the “inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.”
This sense of hope is important to Sacks, as it gives us a “sense of future,” regardless of our circumstances. Having a sense of future allows us to generate meaning.
At the center of this, he stated that the meaning of life is certainly one which centers love. Not just who, but also what and how “one can love.”
Sacks does not just refer to feeling or experiencing the emotion of love for its own sake. He believes it is “constitutive of our whole mental structure,” tying love to our brain’s development.
The medical perspective that Sacks assigns to these emotions and experiences of life creates a sense of urgency over conducting ourselves in a way that honors the potential and breadth of the human experience.
Sacks urges patients, readers, and himself, to keep searching and reinventing the meaning of life. He encourages a sense of unsatisfiable search for meaning that draws people closer to each other, living truly in the moment of all that is possible, giving themselves and others a chance to engage with vulnerability.
He highlights the importance of freedom in this quest—as much as we can or at the very least “the illusion of freedom” as a tool to transcend beyond ourselves.
This transcendence, or detachment, is a “holiday from our inner and outer restrictions” that provides a “more intense sense of the here and now,” highlighting “the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
Pictured is Sacks' studio.
Remembering that Sacks writes from the perspective of a neurologist, his messaging underscores how we should seek to engage in these processes regardless of our physical state.
Meaning that when our brains or bodies begin to fray, the human being always finds ways of being and living. A measure of resilience, it is also our most spectacular capacity as humans.
Sacks, who described himself as a “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant),” didn’t seek meaning in institutions but rather in the “deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.”
In his final volume of essays, he notes that outside of conventional medicine, there are two types of therapies that he found vital for his patients: music and gardens.
Proximity to nature and humility before it commanded his “respect and love,” he stated. He noted in his work ‘Letters’ that: “it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, gives it “meaning.””
In becoming a patient himself at the end of his life, Sacks gained an even greater understanding of his patients and of the complexities of life.
Sacks died of cancer in 2015. Long after his death, readers continue to uncover insights and understanding regarding the human experience. Sacks left behind tens of thousands of letters, photographs, manuscripts, and journals.
Sources: (The Marginalian) (The New York Times) (Harvard Business Review)
See also: Lessons that people usually learn too late in life
The meaning of life, according to Oliver Sacks
Brilliant messages from the late physician and writer
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Oliver Sacks was a brilliant neurologist and author who engaged with his patients with profound empathy and care. For Sacks, his patients were not just cases to be examined, but human beings to be understood on many different levels. His unique approach to medicine included a literary component. Much of his published work was innovative at the time and remains invaluable today. His books and essays often include reflections on life, death, and everything in between, urging readers to live all of life's experiences.
In this gallery, we share some of his reflections on the meaning of life. Click through to find out more.