{"id":6735,"date":"2015-08-29T12:23:47","date_gmt":"2015-08-29T19:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6735"},"modified":"2015-09-13T12:29:40","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T19:29:40","slug":"dr-oliver-sacks-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/08\/29\/dr-oliver-sacks-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Oliver Sacks Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Oliver Sacks, the Doctor<\/h1>\n

By Jerome Groopman<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"
\nPHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON \/ MAGNUM <\/span><\/p>\n

Oliver Sacks, a dear colleague of mine at The New Yorker and in the world of medicine, was an inspiration to me and to countless physicians. A great deal will be said in the coming days about Oliver\u2019s unique literary output\u2014masterful books including \u201cAn Anthropologist on Mars,\u201d \u201cAwakenings,\u201d and \u201cThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.\u201d But we should remember that he also embodied in his medical practice a kind of ideal approach\u2014creative, sensitive, and large-hearted\u2014to his many patients. He was an extraordinary and exemplary doctor.<\/p>\n

Neurology is often depicted as a discipline of great detachment. Sacks, who was eighty-two when he died, trained in the field before the advent of the CT scan and the MRI. He learned to observe his patients in extreme detail, calling on his professional training and uncanny perception to make meticulous analyses of motor strength, reflexes, sensation, and mental status; in doing so, he arrived at a diagnosis that might locate a lesion within the anatomy of the brain or spinal cord. And yet, because medical technology had only gone so far in those days, once this intellectual exercise was completed, there was often very little that could be done to ameliorate most neurological maladies.<\/p>\n

Sacks showed that it was possible to overcome this limited perspective. He questioned absolutist categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and debilitated. He did not ignore or romanticize the suffering of the individual. He sought to locate not just the affliction but a core of creative possibility and a reservoir of potential that was untapped in the patient. There was the case history, for instance, of a color-blind painter who lost all perception of color but discovered that he could capture the nuances of forms and shapes in hues of black and gray with great mastery.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker Oliver Sacks, the Doctor By Jerome Groopman PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON \/ MAGNUM Oliver Sacks, a dear colleague of mine at The New Yorker and in the world of medicine, was an inspiration to me and to countless physicians. A great deal will be said in the coming days about Oliver\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}