Read Vintage Sacks for Free Online Page B

followed (in contrast to the hateful
JAMA
experience of two years earlier) by a wave of interest, and a great number of letters, an exciting correspondence which lasted several weeks. This response put an end to my long years of frustration and obstruction and gave me a decisive encouragement and affirmation. I picked up my long discarded case-histories of 1969, added eleven more, and in two weeks completed
Awakenings.
The case-histories were the easiest to write; they wrote themselves, they stemmed straight from experience, and I have always regarded them with especial affection as the true and unassailable center of
Awakenings.
The rest is disputable, the stories are so.
    But the 1973 publication of
Awakenings,
while attracting much general attention, met the same cold reception from the profession as my articles had done earlier. There was not a single medical notice or review, only a disapproving or uncomprehending silence. There was one brave editor (of the British Clinical Journal) who spoke out on this, making
Awakenings
his “editor’s choice” for 1973, but commenting on “the strange mutism” of the profession toward it.
    I was devastated at this medical “mutism,” but at the same time reassured and encouraged by the reaction of A. R. Luria. Luria himself, after a lifetime of minute neuro-psychological observations, had himself published two extraordinary, almost novelistic case histories—
The Mind of a
Mnemonist
(in 1968) and
The Man with a Shattered World
(1972). To my intense pleasure, in the strange medical silence which attended the publication of
Awakenings,
I received a letter, two letters, from him; in the first, he spoke of his own “biographic” books and approaches:
    Frankly said, I myself like very much the type of “biographical” study, such as Sherashevsky [the Mnemonist] and Zazetski [the man with the “shattered world”] . . . firstly because it is a kind of “Romantic Science” which I wanted to introduce, partly because I am strongly
against
a formal statistical approach and
for
a qualitative study of personality,
for
every attempt to find
factors
underlying the structure of personality. [Letter of July 19, 1973, emphasis in original]
    And in the second, he spoke of
Awakenings:
    I received
Awakenings
and have read it at once with great delight. I was ever conscious and sure that a good clinical description of cases plays a leading role in medicine, especially in Neurology and Psychiatry. Unfortunately, the ability to describe which was so common to the great Neurologists and Psychiatrists of the 19th century [is] lost now, perhaps because of the basic mistake that mechanical and electrical devices can replace the study of personality. . . . Your excellent book shows, that the important tradition of clinical case studies can be revived and with a great success. [Letter of July 25, 1973]
    He then went on to ask me some specific questions, above all expressing his fascination that L-DOPA should be so various and unstable in effect. 6
    I had admired Luria infinitely since my medical school days, and before. When I heard him lecture in London in 1959, I was overwhelmed by his combination of intellectual power and human warmth—I had often encountered these separately, but I had not too often encountered them
together
—and it was exactly this combination which so pleased me in his work, and which made it such an antidote to certain trends in medical writing, which attempted to delete both subjectivity and reflection. Luria’s early works had been, sometimes, a little stilted in character, but they grew in intellectual warmth, in wholeness, as he grew older, culminating in his two late works,
The Mind of a
Mnemonist
and
The Man with a Shattered World.
I do not know how much either of these works influenced me, but they certainly emboldened me, and made it easier to write and publish
Awakenings.
    Luria often said that he had to