The eyes, it's said, are the windows to the soul, but they're also portals to the mind or, rather, the mysterious workings of the brain. In his new book, The Mind's Eye, the celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks examines neurological disorders that affect vision. His aim, as ever, is to shed light on what goes on deep inside our heads. That, at least, is the scientific justification. But this being a Sacks book, what it's really about are the fascinating stories of ordinary people living with extraordinary conditions.
Sacks has long been praised and criticised for the manner in which he combines hard science and literary observation. For many, he is the pioneer of a particular form of personalised essay that has helped rejuvenate scientific writing. In this respect, the New York Times dubbed him "a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine".
For others, like the late psychiatrist Arthur Shapiro, Sacks's blurring of the boundaries between art and science is problematic and potentially misleading. Not alone among medical experts, Shapiro argued that Sacks is "a much better writer than he is a clinician".
What both fans and doubters focus upon is Sacks's tendency to place himself in the action. In such classic works as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he is a kind of an active observer, much like a literary version of those documentary film-makers who thrust themselves in front of the camera.
For Sacks, whose abiding subject is the duality of the mind and the brain, the intrusion is another means of exposing the interplay between subjective perception and objective reality. Or, as he once put it: "I regard everything I write as being at the intersection of the first and third person, biography and autobiography, as it were."
In The Mind's Eye, he goes a step further by including a chapter on his response to his own medical condition, a melanoma of the right eye that was diagnosed in 2005. He writes about the disconcerting optical illusions he experienced as his brain attempted to compensate for the loss created by the tumour. It's not the first time Sacks has strayed into memoir. It's not even the first time that he's written about his own ailments. A Leg to Stand On (1984) recounted his travails after injuring his leg while fleeing from a bull.
But it could be argued that this is the first time that Sacks has placed himself alongside his patients, so to speak. For another common gripe is that he uses his patients, exploiting their stories for his own writerly and commercial ends. The geneticist and disability activist Tom Shakespeare dubbed Sacks "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career".
It's an accusation to which Sacks remains acutely sensitive. He has likened his sense of protectiveness towards those in his care to that of a parent for a child, which may not be an analogy that satisfies his critics. But he has also made a stern defence of medicine as storytelling. "My patients come to me with stories. They have predicaments. They have plights. They come in searching for ways of dealing with these things. There is something dramatic in all this."
Dramatic, it's true, but also inevitably comic. In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Sacks described his lifelong prosopagnosia, or face-blindness – the inability to recognise faces. He recalled an incident that occurred after one of his twice-weekly visits to his psychiatrist. In the lobby of the shrink's offices, he was greeted by a soberly dressed man. "I was puzzled as to why this stranger seemed to know me, until the doorman greeted him by name – it was, of course, my analyst."
Nor is his forgetfulness limited to faces. He also forgets places, routes and names. Although The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat gained almost universal rave reviews, an opposing voice was the philosopher Colin McGinn, who found it unreliable and sentimental. Sacks was so wounded by McGinn's review that he described it as a vivisection. Years later, having forgotten the author, he read a book of McGinn's and liked it so much he sent a fan letter. The two men met up and became friends. It was months before Sacks realised who his new friend was. Tellingly, although deeply hurt, he forgave McGinn.
According to his oldest friend, the doctor and director Jonathan Miller, Sacks's memory problem goes deeper than forgetfulness. "Oliver has aspects of a Borgesian fantasist," Miller once noted. "He remembers things that never happened."
There is also something Proustian about Sacks's writing, as seen in Uncle Tungsten, a memoir of his chemical-obsessed childhood that did for base metal what the Frenchman did for cakes. "I knew zinc – the dull, slightly bluish birdbath in the garden was made of zinc – and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in which sandwiches were wrapped for a picnic."
Born in 1933, Sacks grew up in an intellectually ambitious north London Jewish household. His father was a well-respected GP and his mother one of the country's first female surgeons. Aged six, he was evacuated to a boarding school in Northamptonshire where, he says, he was regularly beaten by a sadistic headmaster.
His parents, by his account, were not the most demonstratively loving of people. His mother would bring deformed foetuses back to the house and, eager that he should learn about anatomy, they would dissect them.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he was an inquisitive boy who didn't naturally appreciate the kinds of boundaries that others took for granted. "Sacks will go far," said his headmaster at St Paul's school, "if he doesn't go too far."
He studied medicine at Oxford and then fled to North America. From Canada, he sent a one-word telegram back to his parents: "Staying". In fact, he hitched to San Francisco, where he befriended the gay poet Thom Gunn and began a four-year residency at UCLA. Gunn encouraged him to write but secretly felt that he lacked empathy.
He began to experiment with drugs, including LSD and amphetamines. "I would take a huge dose of amphetamine," he recently told the New Scientist, "400 tablets on the weekend – and basically have something like a nonstop orgasm for 48 hours."
Eventually, he cleaned up his act and moved to New York, where he began a 45-year stint of analysis every Tuesday and Friday. In 1966, he started working with patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, or chronic sleeping sickness, resulting in his breakthrough 1973 book, Awakenings.
On reading Awakenings, Gunn wrote him a letter in which he marvelled at the depth of humanity displayed in the book. Gunn wondered if it was working with patients, taking acid or falling in love that had transformed his writing. Sacks wasn't sure, but he thought that psychoanalysis had helped develop his creative understanding of others.
In total, he has written 11 books, while also practising as a consultant and an academic – he is currently professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University. His books, like his patients, he has spoken of as his children, in part, no doubt, because he has never had kids. Nor has he married or formed a long-term relationship, though it cannot have been through a lack of opportunity.
For one thing, he is famous. Awakenings not only inspired a Harold Pinter play, but it was turned into a film in which Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was directed as a play by Peter Brook and formed the basis of Michael Nyman's opera of the same name.
Yet he has spurned the celebrity milieu. An accomplished pianist and a compulsive swimmer, he lives in New York, but has never taken US citizenship. He's proud of his "resident alien" status, which he thinks suits his sensibility. By all accounts, each morning he eats the same breakfast – cereal and banana – and each evening the same meal – fish with rice.
The core of his life remains his practice, which, along with his books and writing for the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, forms an impressive and singular body of work "I'm not a real poet, like Thom [Gunn]," he once observed, "but I have some poetry in me. I'm not a real scientist like Francis [Crick], but I have some science in me."
His own optical trick is that he has been able to keep one eye on science and one on literature and each, in its way, has dramatically improved the vision of the other.