Neurológia pre prax 3/2020

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, holder of the California State record in weightlifting (full squat, 600 lbs, 1961), long-distance swimmer, biker, writer… and a neurologist as well: Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP, CBE (1933–2015)

Oliver Sacks was born in London into a family of medical doctors. He studied at St. Paul’s College and then physiology and biology in Oxford under Sinclair’s direction in Sherrington’s laboratory; while in Oxford, he also studied medicine, graduating in 1960. He took his residency in London at Middlesex Hospital where he was house officer to Richard Asher; he then continued in neurology, working as fellow to Kremer and Gilliatt. After a year spent in London hospitals, he moved to the United States and became a resident at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital, finally completing his fellowship in neurology at UCLA General Hospital in Los Angeles. Following that, he accepted a position in neuropathology laboratory at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. After a year or so, he realised that he was not made for laboratory work and took a job as house officer in an asylum for chronic neurological and psychiatric patients, Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. It was here, during clinical testing of L-DOPA in 1969, that he discovered the positive and negative effects of this drug in treating postencephalitic parkinsonism. Given the fact that scholarly journals had repeatedly rejected his original paper reporting on this event, he described the entire story in the form of a case study essay and, later on, in a book titled Awakenings. Published in 1973, the book was an immediate and huge success, and launched Sacks’s career as a unique medical writer; the book was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro. Sacks did not publish classic original papers, case reports, or reviews, but essentially exclusively letters to the editor and books in which he used prose to describe various neurological disorders. This method of professional communication became very popular among lay readers, and very unpopular among experts, particularly British and American ones. Therefore, Sacks actually had no permanent academic position for Neurológia pre prax | 2020;21(3) | www.solen.sk 2 Z histórie neurológie „Dear friends; You will be interested by these papers of Oliver Sacks published by Elsevier, which includes one we wrote together several years ago about PSP and its relation to other tauopathies with Andrew Lees and Dominique. I hope you enjoy. In November just after the CurePSP symposium in La Jolla, I'll attend his memorial service in New York but he does live on in his writing. Best regards. John” Sent from John Steele's iPad jcsteeleguam@yahoo.com Výše uvedený text je obsahem e- -mailu Johna Steela, který zaslal autorům tohoto článku, Dominique Caparros- Lefébvre, Andrewu Leesovi a členům našeho neurodegenerativního a neuroepidemiologického týmu. Bylo to přesně čtyři měsíce poté, co Oliver Sacks podlehl rozsevu melanomu sítnice, o kterém informoval ve fejetonu v New York Times tři roky předtím. Ale začněme od začátku. Oliver Wolf Sacks se narodil 9. 7. 1933 v Cricklewoodu v Londýně, jako nejmladší ze čtyř synů, z nichž tři se stali lékaři. Oba rodiče byli také lékaři, otec Samuel Sacks byl praktickým lékařem ve Whitechapel a East Endu, praktikoval až do svých devadesáti let. Matka Muriel Elsie, rozená Landau, byla jednou z prvních žen – chirurgů v Británii. Rodiny Sacks/Landau byly velmi rozvětvené, matka pocházela z 18 sourozenců. Dva strýcové Sacksova otce působili jako rabíni ve Vestfálsku (odkud rod pocházel), jedním ze Sacksových bratranců byl izraelský ministr zahraničí Abba Eban (Sacks, 2015a; Lees, 2015). Po internátní škole, ze které si odnesl traumatizující zážitky, absolvoval Sacks St. Paul´s College v Londýně a zahájil bakalářské studium na Queen´s College v Oxfordu, promoval z fyziologie a biologie v roce 1956. Během studia pracoval v Sinclairově oxfordské fyziologické laboratoři; byl však svým šéfem tak přetěžován, že ztratil 27 kg tělesné hmotnosti a zhroutil se, přerušil studia a rok strávil v Izraeli v kibucu Ein HaShofet. Po roce pokračoval ve studiu medicíny na oxfordské fakultě, titul doktora medicíny obdržel v roce 1960. Rezidenturu zahájil v Middlesex Hospital v Londýně, kde pracoval jako house officer pod vedením Richarda Ashera po dobu půl roku, další půlrok jako neurologický rezident u Kremera a Gilliatta. Z důvodů, které zveřejnil až v autobiografii těsně před smrtí, se rozhodl v rezidentuře pokračovat v USA (Sacks, 2014; Sacks, 2015a). V roce 1961 přesídlil do Kalifornie a pokračoval v rezidentuře v nemocnici Mount Zion v San Franciscu, asi po roce se přesunul do neuropatologické laboratoře UCLA v Los Angeles, kde se věnoval výzkumu v této oblasti, a to poměrně úspěšně (Sacks, 1965; Sacks, 1966a, b). V Kalifornii také mohl konečně věnovat dostatek času svým dvěma tehdejším hlavním koníčkům: motorkářství a vzpírání. Stal se členem motorkářského gangu, se kterým podnikal dlouhé výlety, např. noční trip ke Grand Canyonu a zpět, celkem 1 000 mil (Lees, 2015). Stal se pravidelným návštěvníkem Muscle the rest of his career, and made his living as a consultant to several New York City-area nursing homes and was an occasional teacher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and NYU School of Medicine; it was only in 2007 that he was appointed full professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, New York. During his life, he addressed in depth various phenomena that he eventually always described and discussed in detail in his books: headache (Migraine), central effects of peripheral injury (A Leg to Stand On), autism (An Anthropologist on Mars), hallucinations (Hallucinations), amusia (Seeing Voices), the effect of music on thinking (Musicophilia), agnosia (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), endemic parkinsonism and achromatopsia (The Island of the Colorblind, with J. C. Steele), etc. Sacks’s efforts to introduce the suffering of neurological patients to other people were, after all, understood and, toward the end of his life, he received a number of honorary doctorates and other honours; he was also appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. He died of metastatic retinal melanoma on the penultimate day of August 2015. His farewell to the world was a couple of brilliant essays published in the New York Times while he was still alive; they were published posthumously as a collection titled Gratitude.

Keywords: Oliver Sacks, postencephalitic parkinsonism, Guam parkinsonism-dementia complex