Remarkable footage shows the pioneering neurologist at work in this excellent documentary
Take your pick of extraordinary moments in this excellent documentary about the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. In 2015, aged 82, knowing he had months to live, Sacks sat down at home in
New York and talked to the camera with great honesty. During his childhood in north
London, he recalls his mother, a surgeon and gynaecologist, bringing home a foetus for him, aged 10 or 11, to dissect. Later, when she found out he was gay, she told him he was an abomination, that he should never have been born.
In his mid-20s, Sacks escaped London, his mother and homophobia for the freedom of California. There is a photo of him arriving at work on a huge motorbike, shaggy beard, puffing a cigar, looking like an extra from Easy Rider – only he’s wearing a white lab coat. This was around the time he was a physician to a
California chapter of the Hells Angels and had an amphetamine habit that would have killed an ordinary man. But he was a champion weight-lifter; the bulk saved his life.