A Leg to Stand on
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Dr. Oliver Sacks's books *Awakenings*, *An Anthropologist on Mars* and the bestselling *The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat* have been acclaimed for their extraordinary compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders.
In *A Leg to Stand On*, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey when he finds that his leg uncannily no longer feels part of his body. Sacks's brilliant description of his crisis and eventual recovery is not only an illuminating examination of the experience of patienthood and the inner nature of illness and health but also a fascinating exploration of the physical basis of identity.
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I think this is my favorite Sacks book, and I tend to like everything he writes. Not only did it have lots of interesting information about ways that brain function can go awry, it turned out to be a treatise on the philosophy of identity and self. And not a bad one, at that.
I must be on a compassion kick. I picked up this book expecting to learn more neuro, but what I got instead is a view of the road to Enlightenment. Oliver Sacks, already an MD but not yet in the field we know him for, is badly injured. During his recovery he experiences an eerie loss of proprioception, of the sense of whole body. OK, nothing really new there – that wasn't well documented in 1980, but it certainly is now.
What really captured me, though, was his feelings as he tried–and failed–to be understood by his nurses and doctors. Confusion, frustration, fear, understanding, ... acceptance and understanding. Doctor as Patient, a new perspective. Rather than put it behind him, he uses it to create the Oliver Sacks we know today. It is clear that this experience shaped him, not just his interest in neuropathologies but especially his ability to understand his patients, to empathize, and then to communicate that in his later books.
A Leg to Stand On is not easy reading: his prose is dense, awkward, not yet a mature voice. Despite that, this is a book worth reading (but not as your first Oliver Sacks book. Read 1-2 others first).
