"The most interesting doctor in the world"

Oliver Sacks is generally considered the world’s most famous neurologist, a brilliant chemist, a renowned doctor for diseases of the psyche, and according to Paul Theroux, is “the most interesting doctor in the world”.

Sacks is professor of neurology at Albert Einstein Medical Center and the author of several books, including the best-seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Sacks was raised in London during the Blitz and was sent at the age of six to a boarding school, whose headmaster was brutal and sadistic, beating the boys every day.

In an interview in the Financial Times, Sacks describes the effects of those beatings. “It affects the three Bs—belief, belonging and bonding—and I suppose one does have a problem with trust and expressing one’s emotions after an experience of that kind.”

Sacks’ latest book is called Uncle Tungsten, wherein he describes his experiences at this dehumanizing boarding school. Upon his first visit home, after nearly a year away, he had a complex mixture of feelings: relief, anger, pleasure and apprehension.

A curious and shameful episode from that visit has stayed in his mind these past 60 years. One of his first acts was to imprison the family dog, whom he loved dearly, in a freezing coalbin in the yard outside, “where her pitiful whimperings and barkings could not be heard”.

It was only much later that Sacks admitted what he had done and the dog was rescued, almost frozen, from the bin. Sacks’ father was furious, gave him a “good hiding” and made him stand in a corner for the rest of the day.

“There was no enquiry, however, as to why I had been so uncharacteristically naughty, why I had behaved so cruelly to a dog I had loved; nor, had I been asked, could I have told them. But it was surely a message, a symbolic act of some kind, trying to draw my parents’ attention to my coalbin, Braefield, my misery and helplessness there…

“For when I was suddenly abandoned by my parents (as I saw it), my trust in them, my love for them, was rudely shaken, and with this my belief in God, too.”