Awakenings Oliver Sacks Quotes

As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe. -DONNE

One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

being.

Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: ‘I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.

from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin … with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.

We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?

Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together, and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.

Awakening, basically, is a reversal of this: the patient ceases to feel the presence of illness and the absence of the world, and comes to feel the absence of his illness and the full presence of the world.

What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here—that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease! Precisely

there is a world of difference between complexity and anarchy. The weather is complex, it is not anarchic.

The structure of chaos is not static but dynamic;

Chorea—a twinkling movement or motor scintillation—does not have its origin in the cerebral cortex, but in the deeper parts of the brain, the basal ganglia and upper brainstem, which are the parts that mediate normal awakening. Thus these observations of chorea during migraine support the notion that migraine is a form of arousal disorder, something located in the strange borderlands of sleep—a disorder which has its origin deep in the brainstem, and not superficially, in the cortical mantle, as is often supposed (a

To restore the human subject at the center—the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a “who” as well as a “what,” a real person, a patient, in relation to disease—in relation to the physical. The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.

Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.

The perverse need for illness — both in patients themselves, and sometimes in those who are close to them — must be a major determinant in causing relapses, the most insidious enemy of the will-to-get-better:

The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfully restored to ourselves and the world.

A major defining factor was my wanting him to be part of the DC Universe. Because if someone as powerful as the Sandman was running all the dreams in the world, a natural question would be “Why haven’t we heard about him by now?” The answer I came up with was “He’s been locked away.” And that solution formed an image in my head of a naked man in a glass cell. My next question was “How long had he been trapped there?” The movie Awakenings hadn’t been made yet, but I’d read Oliver Sacks’s book a few months earlier, so I knew about the encephalitis lethargica, or “sleepy sickness,” that had swept Europe in 1916. Scientists to this day don’t understand what caused it, and I loved the idea of blaming it on the Sandman’s imprisonment, so I determined the length of his stay to be seventy-two years—ending in late 1988, when the series debuted. And so on; each plot point just seemed to naturally lead to the next one.

Alex the Sick stands with Royal KNIL ceding control over colonialism.

I said, you were not invited, but did not even Watch Time.

This sense of genuine and generous, if involuntary, martyrdom is not unknown to the patients themselves. Thus Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: "I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering".

These were “fossil behaviors,” Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in the first place, and now “awakened” by L-dopa.1 I

Si un hombre ha perdido una pierna o un ojo, sabe que ha perdido una pierna o un ojo; pero si ha perdido el yo, si se ha perdido a sí mismo, no puede saberlo, porque no está ahí ya para saberlo.

To restore the human subject at the centre--the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject--we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what', a real person, a patient, in relation to disease--in relation to the physical.

Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?

... that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally drawn to the scientific and romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness- animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

The ‘other’ side, the good side, of chronic hospitals is that what staff they have may work and live in them for decades, may become extraordinarily close to their charges, the patients, get to know and love them, recognize, respect them, as people. So when I came to Mount Carmel I did not just encounter ‘eighty cases of post-encephalitic disease,’ but eighty individuals, whose inner lives and total being was (to a considerable extent) known to the staff, known in the vivid, concrete knowing of relationship, not the pallid, abstract knowing of medical knowledge. Coming to this community – a community of patients, but also of patients and staff – I found myself encountering the patients as individuals, whom I could less and less reduce to statistics or lists of symptoms

...a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians.

there is no necessary dilution of reality in representation; quite the opposite, if the representation has power. Reality is conferred, re-conferred, by every original representation.

Oliver Sacks’s The Awakening were victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic.)