Oliver Sacks Chapter Summaries

Oliver Sacks, M.D. is a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.” He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and An Anthropologist on Mars. Awakenings, his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robbin Williams. •••Oliver Sacks is An Anthropologist on Mars construe stories of individuals with neurological disorders as paradoxical

He conveys that people with disabilities can embrace and become one with their contradictions and live productive and successful lives. In the passages. “The Case of the Colorblind Painter”, “A Surgeons Life and “The Last Hippie” Dr. Sacks articulates the conditions of a painter that was a well-experienced artist and how his life took a tragic yet magnificent turn, and how doctor with a inherited neuropsychiatric disorder defeats all odds and has a successful medical carrier. Oliver Sacks also The Last Hippie” also has a similar context as connected from the current state of the patient. He describes to a relative knowledge history concerning the brain’s frontal lobe function. This also involves some of the significant problems resulting from the damage caused on the lobes.

The case of a “Colorblind Painter”, Oliver Sacks first met Mr. I. in April 1986. In early March 1986 Mr. I. explained how he became Colorblind in his letter to Oliver Sacks. Oliver Sacks gave more detail of a successful painter that was a well experienced artists and how his life took a tragic yet magnificent turn. Mr. I. whom is a 65-years-old man that was caught in a car accident. This accident left him in with an unusual condition known as Cerebral Achromatopsia, which is a form of colorblindness caused by brain damage. Doctors diagnosed him with conditions after numerous tests. This condition made him see the world through a black and white perspective. At first Mr. I. was very uncomfortable with this condition, as a painter, you would think one needs exemplary visions of colors. Due to his colorblindness, he felt lost, he felt as if the world has been taken away from him. His condition made him over think about what is next in life and with that depression steps in. Mr. I. didn't appreciate life anymore, things became abnormal to him, eating become a nuisance to him. He doesn’t enjoy watching T.V, nor does he enjoy having sex anymore. As said in the text “He shunned social intercourse and found sexual intercourse impossible. He saw people’s flesh, his wife’s flesh, his own flesh as abhorrent grey “flesh-colored” now appeared “rat colored” to him”. His life was stripped away from him and he knew it was, all the activities he used to enjoy became his daily