This quote encapsulates a central critique Sacks wages against his own discipline. ‘Deficit’, we have said, is neurology’s favourite word–its only word, indeed, for any disturbance of function. Rather, it is a far more humanistic and empathetic approach to discussing neurological disease an element of the human condition that will ultimately affect us all. To augment a scientific case history into a semi-fictional narrative does not, in Sacks’ book, make it any less valuable. Many scientific studies in the realm of the mind completely remove the humanity from their subjects, reducing them to the most basic character markers and traits. Here Sacks states the central purpose of his narrative work. To restore the human subject at the centre–the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject–we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale only then do we have a ‘who’ as well as a ‘what’, a real person, a patient in relation to disease–in relation to the physical.
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