By Siri Hustvedt | The New York Times
Since his first extraordinary work, “Migraine,” was published in 1970, the neurologist Oliver Sacks has been writing a particular kind of medical literature. His detailed explications of a single patient’s symptoms, his emphasis on the subjective experience of illness, his willingness to share stories from his own life and his references to medical texts from earlier centuries are not only atypical of how most neurologists work today, they defy the status quo. And yet, Sacks’ work is part of a long tradition of descriptive, narrative, case-oriented medical writing he has himself called “romantic.”
The idea of a “romantic science” can be traced to Goethe. The German philosopher, poet and scientist opposed a mechanistic, analytical science of static categories for a fluid and organic one. A. R. Luria, the 20th-century Soviet neurologist, who was a mentor to and friend of Sacks, evoked the tension between “romantic” and “classical” science in his intellectual autobiography, “The Making of Mind.” “Romantic scholars,” he wrote, “do not follow the path of reductionism.” Instead they strive “to preserve the wealth of living reality.” Classical scholars work piecemeal toward the formulation of abstract laws, and in the process they sometimes “murder to dissect.” Romantics may err in the other direction when their “artistic preferences and intuition” take over. Luria sought a middle ground — a science that preserves the part without losing the synthetic whole. This is not an easy balance to achieve, but for Sacks, unlike many clinicians in his field, it remains an ideal. Read More...