Positive reviews for "Migraine"

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Drafting books on 'tics', sub-cortical functions and Awakenings

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Positive reviews for Migraine

Oliver Sacks Scientist

	Views	Duration
121. The blissful feeling having written Migraine	297	01:11
122. Wanting to publish addendums to Migraine	266	02:11
123. The publishing of Migraine	274	02:20
124. Starting to see the Awakenings patients	322	00:46
125. The use of L-DOPA in the Awakenings patients	472	01:46
126. Positive reviews for Migraine	261	01:26
127. Drafting books on 'tics', sub-cortical functions and...	249	01:28
128. Responding to Luria's work on higher cortical functions	267	01:03
129. Letters to the editors of 'The Lancet' and 'JAMA'	243	04:07
130. Encouragement from James Purdon Martin	316	00:56

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To come back, or rather to jump forward again, to January of 1971, Migraine came out. It was reviewed very pleasantly both in the general press and in the medical press. I’ve omitted a story here. With the original draft of Migraine in '67 there was a reader at Faber's who made a peculiar comment. His comment was, he said, 'This is too easy to read. This will make people suspicious – professionalise it'. This might have been said of the rather novelistic case history I’d written about Jakob-Creutzfeldt [sic] in 1964. But anyhow I think the right sort of balance was achieved in... in the re-writing, and... and I think my father, who had been so alarmed when he saw something in The Times, started to be reassured when he saw good things in The British Medical Journal and The Lancet. And the fact that that... that this was not a scandal, that I had perhaps written a reasonable book which my colleagues liked.

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: Positive reviews for "Migraine"

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: Migraine, The Times, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, Faber & Faber

Duration: 1 minute, 26 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2011

Date story went live: 02 October 2012