MIND OVER MATTER

Did the celebrated neurologist Oliver Sacks write his patients into case studies of his own psyche?

- BY RACHEL AVIV

Sacks, the author of "Awakenings," popularized the link between storytelling and healing. He was in therapy for five decades.

When Oliver Sacks arrived in New York City, in September, 1965, he wore a butter-colored suit that reminded him of the sun. He had just spent a romantic week in Europe travelling with a man named Jenö Vincze, and he found himself walking too fast, fizzing with happiness. “My blood is champagne,” he wrote. He kept a letter Vincze had written him in his pocket all day, feeling as if its pages were glowing. Sacks had moved to New York to work as a fellow in neuropathology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, and a colleague observed that he was “walking on air.” Every morning, he carefully polished his shoes and shaved. He adored his bosses. “I smile like a lighthouse in all directions,” he wrote Vincze.

Sacks was thirty-two, and he told Vincze that this was his first romantic relationship that was both physical and reciprocal. He felt he was part of a “two man universe,” seeing the world for the first time—“seeing it clear, and seeing it whole.” He wandered along the shipping piers on the Hudson River, where gay men cruised, with a notebook that he treated as a diary and as an endless letter to Vincze. “To watch life with the eyes of a homosexual is the greatest thing in the world,” Vincze had once told Sacks.