EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

First Loves and Last Tales

 Oliver Sacks

 

 

I choose this book because after going through some of his research articles I want to explore Oliver Sacks’ life from a different angle. Everything In Its Place: First loves and Last Tales is a collection of Oliver Sacks’ articles. These articles cover a huge variety of topics including stories of childhood, how he developed a love for science, our need for gardens, and some mental diseases, which I found intriguing since his works are predominately on neurological diseases, hallucination, and aging. It is this book that gives me the chance to understand his humor, passion, his optimistic attitude toward life. 

Fun Story:

Hiccups and Other Curious Behaviors

Mr.B is a survivor of encephalitis lethargica, “sleepy sickness” with serious postencephalitic parkinsonism. To reduce the symptoms of parkinsonism he did a crysurgey.  RIght after that, he began to hiccup. By 1935, the espiratory behaviors disappear among the postencephalitic patients. However, 30 years later, when Oliver Sacks gave them L-dopa….

“Once, doing late-night rounds among my postencephalitic patients, I heard a singular sound, a sort of chorus, from a four-bedded room. When I looked in, I found that all four patients were asleep but singing in their sleep—a rather dreary, repetitive singsong melody, but one in which the four voices were synchronized and attuned with each other. Sleepwalking, sleep talking, and sleep singing were not uncommon in these sleepy-sickness patients, but it was the coordination of the four sleeping singers that amazed me. ”