On Libraries by Oliver Sacks
Essayist's Bio….
Ø Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and died in 2015.
Ø Education he took from Queen’s College, Oxford, Mount
Zion Hospital, and UCLA in the USA.
Ø worked for nearly 50
years as a neurologist.
Ø Wrote a book, Awakenings, about a sick person whom he
met.
Ø Involved in case studies of patients with unusual
disorders.
Ø They became best-sellers and were found in many movies and
operas.
Ø The New York Times referred to him as “the poet laureate
of medicine.”
His books are:
Ø The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Ø Musicophilia
Ø Hallucinations
Received awards and honors:
Ø The Guggenheim
Foundation
Ø The National Science Foundation,
Ø The American Academy of Arts and Letters
Ø The Royal College of Physicians.
Vocabularies
Ø Oak (adj.): having a rich brown color like that of oak
wood.
Ø Paneled(adj.): an area with a wall or fence
Ø Ibsen’s Plays: Henrik Ibsen’s Plays, 19th C.
writer of Norway
Ø morocco (n.): a fine soft material used for making covers
for books
Ø Ur-library(n): main library
Ø Treatise (n): a formal, lengthy and systematic discourse
like a thesis.
Ø curl up (v.): to form or make something form into a curl or
curls
Ø Bodleian (adj.): an English scholar, Sir Thomas Bodley,
of 16th C- founder of the Bodleian Library.
Ø Subterranean(adj.): Underground
Ø absorbed (adv.): with one’s attention fully held
Ø hungered for (v.): to have a strong desire for somebody/something
Ø devoured (v.): to eat something completely and quickly,
especially because of hunger
Ø stumbled upon (v.): to find somebody/something unexpectedly
or by chance
Ø improvisation (n.): music, a part in a play
Ø incunabula (n.): an early printed book, especially one
printed before 1501
Ø magniloquence (n.): use of high-flown language
Ø lapidary (adj.): elegant and precise
Ø catacombs (n.): a series of underground tunnels
Ø enclave (n.): a small territory belonging to one state or
group of people surrounded by that of another
Ø pokey (adj.): small and cramped
Ø aloft (adv.): overhead
Ø stacks (n.): piles or heaps of something
Ø camaraderie (n.): friendship and trust
Ø Rummaging (v.): to turn things over and esp. make them
untidy while searching for something.
Summary: The essay "On Libraries" extols the
virtues of free thought, volunteerism, and the thrill of fortuitous or
unexpected discovery. The brilliant neurologist, author, and voracious reader
was one of the titans of the intellect and soul who was molded and
preserved by libraries. In this brief piece, which is part of the collection of
essays titled "Everything in its place: First Love & Last Tales,"
he recalls his upbringing in England. This essay explores
the writer's love of the library, his life's passion, and intellectual independence. The
author of the article was raised in a home with an oak-paneled library that his
father built. Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian author, was in love with his father, a
Hebrew scholar. There were plays by Henrik Ibsen, history texts, etc. in the
library. Sacks read The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and liked the imaginary
character Mowgli. He had a home library full of literature because his pedantic
mother also read works by G.B. Shaw, William Shakespeare, Anthony Trollope,
John Milton, and other medical authors. Since he was 3 years old, the author
has always read novels.
Although he was a
passive learner in his academic subject, he spent the majority of his
adolescence in the UK's Willesden Library. Sacks read astronomy and chemistry,
but there were no chemistry textbooks in his school. As a result, he went to
Walker Library with his mentor's approval. Sacks frequented the Bodleian
Library and Radcliffe Science Library while attending the institution. He had
the idea to write Theodore Hook's biography when he was reading the author.
Sacks uses the British Museum Library to obtain data for that bio to make it much better. He enjoyed reading Charles Darwin, Sir Thomas Browne,
Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, etc. in the Queen's College and
Oxford College libraries.
He started residing in a modest New
York apartment in 1965. He wrote a novel called Migraine even though the apartment's limited space makes it difficult to read and write and found it
much more comfortable to read and write at Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
and he was able to make one best buddy as well because they were both looking
for the same book-Volumes of Brain.
The renowned neurologist
and author Oliver Sacks is a unique figure in both the scientific community and
the literary world. His work stands on the border of empirical, scientific
reporting and subjective, narrative accounts of his patients. He didn't stop
going to the libraries, but in 1990 he discovered that students preferred to
browse the internet to get information. Although his works have received a
great deal of respect from academics across fields, they have also come under
fire. His narrative approach has drawn criticism from academics in the
scientific world for being qualitative rather than quantitative and personal
rather than observational, while academics in the humanities have accused him
of taking advantage of his patients.
Oliver Sacks and the
Clinical Tale: Sacks,
who was born on July 9th, 1933, in London to two doctors, showed an early
interest in science. His mother was the first woman to join the Royal College
of Physicians and Surgeons and his mother was an anatomy professor. His father
was a general practitioner. He writes in his memoir On the Move that he
"was enamored with both science and literature" when he was young and
was able to take lessons in both fields easily when he was in school, despite
not always knowing he wanted to be a doctor. Two of his brothers were also
doctors. However, he noticed a social and physical gap between
students pursuing science degrees and the rest of the university's students
when he attended Oxford as a pre-med student. He decided to write his
biographical essays, but clinical ones, "presenting individuals with
unusual weaknesses or strengths and showing the influence of these special
features on their lives; they would, in short, be clinical biographies or case
histories of a sort, as he immersed himself in the principles of
neurophysiology and the like, and realized he was missing "general reading"
aside from Essays in Biography by Maynard Keynes.
Criticisms, Lack of Real
Science: Sacks
often found it difficult to win the same amount of praise from the scientific
community despite the enthusiasm he garnered from the non-medical sector. The
praise he received from scientists and colleagues diminished as his writing
changed from the papers he published in neurological journals as a resident to
full-length novels of clinical narratives intended for lay readers and
professionals alike, and he frequently found himself struggling to have his
clinical papers published in medical journals at all. The lack of enthusiasm
was mostly attributable to his unconventional writing style, and despite his
need to break from tradition, he frequently worried about releasing further
works that would be perceived as unconventional by the community of scientists
who write.
At Last: Through
his work and publications, Oliver Sacks had a singular and ground-breaking
method of bridging the arts and sciences. The way he described his patients has
ramifications for general readers, the scientific community, and the literary
community, particularly in light of the claim that it is getting harder and
harder to close the knowledge gap between scientists and humanists. His
writings have applications in the social sciences, the field of education, and
fields spanning disciplines, in addition to the local literary and natural
science communities. He was criticized for deviating from the standard
scientific writing format, yet his contributions to the literary and scientific
worlds were incredibly valuable.
Sacks were able to more
compassionately describe sickness as a part of his patients by writing in the
style of clinical tales. He contributed to reviving the neurological narrative
tradition, elevating the patient's experience in medicine, and placing the
patient back in the center of the case study. His words made disease and the
struggles his patients experienced more relatable, removing the stigma
associated with mental illness and showing readers how much in common with his
patient's care. This promotes empathy among the general public and
raises awareness of those who are suffering.
Sacks' approach serves
to improve traditional, mechanistic research rather than to replace it. In
addition, by considering himself as a patient, he humanized himself as a doctor
and reminded readers that other doctors might also be relatable. He
incorporated a lot of his personal experiences into his work and treated his
patients with the same compassion and understanding that was frequently lacking
in how other people handled him. In many ways, Sacks had a personal connection
to the transcendence he so frequently referred to in the stories of his
patients.
Sacks’ obituary in The Guardian Newspaper: “…Sacks was such a resonant writer precisely
because his sense of the importance of the personal and human, learned partly
from his humane medical parents, is tempered by an equal attraction toward the
abstract and scientific. His writing inhabits the tension, constantly present
in medicine, between art and science, the warmth of individual lives and the
cooler strength of general principles.”
More scientific and medical writers need to
explore the tension Sacks' work occupied. Few authors have done more to settle
the issue than Oliver Sacks, even though many academics have made it
clear that science and medicine need to be in conversation with the humanities.
He may have contributed most by incorporating his personal experiences into his
work since he probably would not have shown the same degree of empathy if he
had not realized that his own treatment as a patient lacked a greater level of
compassion.
Answer the following questions.
a. Where the author could be found when he was late for lunch or dinner?
Answer: When he was late for lunch or supper, the author could be found in a small lab and the dad-built oak-paneled library.
b. What are his first memories?
Answer: The books in the library with the oak panels were Oliver Sack’s first memory.
c. Why did he dislike school?
Answer: He didn't like going to school since he had to watch the instructors follow orders while he read an excessive amount of books from the library.
d. What did he feel about the library?
Answer: He felt free to browse and study thousands of books in a welcoming setting at the library, accelerating his pace of learning.
e. Why was he so biased about sciences especially astronomy and chemistry?
Answer: Because science was his area of interest and there appeared to be many books with bigger portions that he could not read at all, he was very inclined toward the sciences, especially astronomy and chemistry. As a result, he chose Science and Astronomy.
f. Why did he become so fascinated by Hook?
Answer: Theodore Hook, who was well-known in the 19th century for theatrical and musical improvisation and who wrote 500 operas, captivated him to the point where he got obsessed with him.
g. Describe the library at Queen’s College.
Answer: Christopher Wren built the Queen's College Library in England, which featured a large collection of books and a beautiful setting. The library also had a sizable underground holding area.
h. Why did the students ignore the bookshelves in the 1990s?
Answer: due to their access to electronic books.
i. Why was he horrified when he visited the library a couple of months ago?
Answer: Oliver was appalled when he went to the
library a few months ago because, thanks to the computerized book system, the
majority of the shelves were lightly populated and the books were strewn
around.
Reference Book: The man
who mistook his wife by Oliver Sack:
The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales, by Oliver
Sacks, is a captivating collection of medical cases. The book is meant to be
read by healthcare professionals, as the author uses an abundance of medical
terminology, but can also be read by the everyday person because Sacks
explains the medical jargon. As a professor of neurology, Oliver Sacks invites
his readers into the most interesting cases during his clinical experience.
This book broadened my knowledge of medical cases and taught me to have empathy
for those affected by certain disorders. I enjoyed learning about the author’s
different cases because it is amazing how complex the human brain is.