The Author (Oliver Sacks)

Oliver Sacks is a noted neurologist, scientific investigator, physician, and writer. He is perhaps best known for his memoir Awakenings, which in 1990 was made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name. Throughout his practice and writings, including A Leg to Stand On, Sacks challenges traditional thinking and practice around neurological science, considering it in relation to a patient's complete state of being and not, as he suggests most neurologists do, as a single isolated element of a patient's life. He is, in other words, interested in the emotional and sometimes spiritual aspects and/or manifestations of neurological function as well as the physical and/or the chemical.

In A Leg to Stand On, Sacks undergoes an important and, he would probably say, essential transformation when he experiences, apparently for the first time, medical treatment from the perspective of a patient rather than that of...