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Did I really have that bad a time in Oxford and California?

RELATED STORIES

Photography, migraines and neurology
Oliver Sacks Scientist
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I’m excited now by the power of digital photography, but I... I lament the old days when one was stained with thiosulphate and you spent hours in the ruby light of a darkroom and... and you could make a colour print layer by layer of cyan, the magenta, the yellow, get them all precisely superimposed. And photography on the one hand and, I think, migraine on the other hand, and... as a boy, I had severe migraine auras which I still have, in these there’s no headache or anything but you may lose half your field of vision, there may be brilliant, scintillating zigzags, you may lose colour or get exaggerated colour, or stereo. And I think the migraine experience, on the one hand, and the photographic on the other, partly steered me to neurology and especially an interest in... in the visual system, in seeing and image.

 

 

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was born in England. Having obtained his medical degree at Oxford University, he moved to the USA. There he worked as a consultant neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital where in 1966, he encountered a group of survivors of the global sleepy sickness of 1916-1927. Sacks treated these patients with the then-experimental drug L-Dopa producing astounding results which he described in his book Awakenings. Further cases of neurological disorders were described by Sacks with exceptional sympathy in another major book entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat which became an instant best seller on its publication in 1985. His other books drew on his rich experiences as a neurologist gleaned over almost five decades of professional practice. Sacks's work was recognized by prestigious institutions which awarded him numerous honours and prizes. These included the Lewis Thomas Prize given by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He was an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.

Listeners: Kate Edgar

Kate Edgar, previously Managing Editor at the Summit Books division of Simon and Schuster, began working with Oliver Sacks in 1983. She has served as editor and researcher on all of his books, and has been closely involved with various films and adaptations based on his work. As friend, assistant, and collaborator, she has accompanied Dr Sacks on many adventures around the world, clinical and otherwise.

Tags: photography, dark room, migraine, neurology

Duration: 1 minute, 13 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2011

Date story went live: 02 October 2012