Oliver Sacks, the neurologist with the soul of a humanist, dies

One of the great science communicators of our time has died: the brilliant Oliver Sacks.

Oliver Sacksfamous neurologist and renowned author of books such as "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "Awakenings", died yesterday, died yesterday, August 30, 2015, at the age of 82. Sacks had already announced in February this year that he was in the terminal stage and had only a few months to live. The world thus loses one of the best science popularizers.

A death foretold but equally mourned by the entire scientific community.

Sacks leaves us a legacy of inestimable quality in the form of popular literature on the functioning of the organs to which we owe the ability to think, see and feel. His dissertations about what he was researching are almost indistinguishable from the parts in which he narrates experiences and reflections in situ.

This is reflected in his way of writing, direct and accessible to all audiences, not without philosophical questions that are outlined for the reader to try to answer them. But the quality of Oliver Sacks goes far beyond his knowledge of neurology and his facility with words to easily communicate ideas and concepts as fascinating as they are complicated, or his way of posing intellectual challenges to motivate the reader and make them want to know more.

His vocation for the study of the human being is not the only thing that is reflected in his writings: it is also reflected, in a more veiled but equally manifest way, in his humanist heart, a force that moved him to love and appreciate the subjective, the private, the emotional and phenomenological, that which belongs to the people he studied and to which he could never have had access as a scientist.

Beyond scientific laws

Throughout his work, Oliver Sacks gave us many great examples of how to talk about disorders and illness with total respect for the patient. In the literature he authored, people who could be considered insane are portrayed with total humanity.

He did not write as if he were dissecting incomplete beings or absolutely different from the rest: eccentric men, women with unusual problems, but never people separated from humanity by an impassable gap. Oliver Sacks talks about these people to show how the human body works: what makes us the same, what works the same in each of us, without taking our eyes off the particularity of each human being but without emphasizing the differences.

That is why his books are possibly the best way to learn about psychiatric illness and the rules that govern our brains without taking our eyes off what makes us capable of feeling, loving and experiencing. The human quality that emanates from the literature written by Oliver Sacks is difficult to find in popular science, and even less so in that which talks about the engine of our emotions and thoughts.