Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?

"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 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."

Oliver Sacks linked healing and narrative, using stories to influence patients' experiences and occasionally to reshape their realities. He arrived in New York City in September 1965, exuberant after a romantic trip with Jenö Vincze, wearing a butter-colored suit and carrying Vincze's letters. He worked as a neuropathology fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and felt liberated, polishing his shoes each morning and admiring his mentors. His mother condemned his homosexuality, prompting a move to America for sexual and moral freedom. He kept a notebook that served as both diary and continuous letter to Vincze while exploring gay life along the Hudson piers.

Read at The New Yorker