'Doctors are all prone to telling stories'

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Remembering every patient I've ever had

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'Doctors are all prone to telling stories'

Oliver Sacks Scientist

	Views	Duration
31. Joining my mother on her house calls	482	00:56
32. Sampling anaesthetics as a 10-year-old	520	01:06
33. My father's dispensary	456	00:42
34. My father's faithful secretary	481	01:01
35. My mother's career as a woman surgeon	568	03:37
36. Table conversation at home was all medical	464	01:26
37. 'Doctors are all prone to telling stories'	488	01:14
38. Remembering every patient I've ever had	521	01:41
39. My mother's influence on my storytelling style	481	01:59
40. What brought my mother to medicine?	489	00:24

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I think doctors are all prone to telling stories and telling stories is essential in a medical life. The patient tells you his story. You listen to his story. You try and get more details. You compare it with other stories you’ve heard. Unlike the scientific mind which thinks in terms of... of generalities, I think, the individual... the individual and the sense of biography, the sense of particular people, has to be central in medicine or most forms of medicine.

My father practiced until his dying day, almost. He died at 94 and he’d qualified at 20, so he had nearly three-quarters of a century of practice. He had seen thousands and thousands of patients, tens of thousands probably, but, I think, he remembered them all. This is... this is... and I have a little bit of this myself.

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was born in England. Having obtained his medical degree at Oxford University, he moved to the USA. There he worked as a consultant neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital where in 1966, he encountered a group of survivors of the global sleepy sickness of 1916-1927. Sacks treated these patients with the then-experimental drug L-Dopa producing astounding results which he described in his book Awakenings. Further cases of neurological disorders were described by Sacks with exceptional sympathy in another major book entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat which became an instant best seller on its publication in 1985. His other books drew on his rich experiences as a neurologist gleaned over almost five decades of professional practice. Sacks's work was recognized by prestigious institutions which awarded him numerous honours and prizes. These included the Lewis Thomas Prize given by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He was an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.

Title: 'Doctors are all prone to telling stories'

Listeners: Kate Edgar

Kate Edgar, previously Managing Editor at the Summit Books division of Simon and Schuster, began working with Oliver Sacks in 1983. She has served as editor and researcher on all of his books, and has been closely involved with various films and adaptations based on his work. As friend, assistant, and collaborator, she has accompanied Dr Sacks on many adventures around the world, clinical and otherwise.

Tags: medicine, story, patients, father, biography

Duration: 1 minute, 14 seconds

Date story recorded: 19-23 September, 2011

Date story went live: 02 October 2012