Oliver Sacks: His Own Life Soundtrack (2019)

Synopsis

Beyond his remarkable life, two items prompt the making of this documentary started in 2015 on neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, which is told largely from his own perspective: the completion and publication of his memoirs, titled On the Move: A Life, from which he sometimes reads directly for this piece, and the news of his terminal cancer diagnosis which would indeed take his life in six months from receiving that news.

Items discussed about his professional life include: the reasons tied to his family in why he went into the sciences; his path into neurology being somewhat a punishment; his humanistic approach to his work which ended up being largely in case studies; the story behind "Awakenings", made into the movie Awakenings (1990), for which he is arguably most well known but also arguably for which not most renowned within scientific circles; and largely being considered before his time in being generally dismissed by the scientific community when any of his scientific work was first published.

On the personal side, he talks about his general shyness, his inquisitive nature shaping his approach to work, but mostly how his homosexual orientation shaped his life, and finally finding love late in his life after decades of celibacy.

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