'Poet laureate of medicine' bids farewell

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As we go about our lives, Dr. Oliver Sacks, 81, is facing the end of his. The brilliant neurologist and writer wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times last month describing his final opus. His last project, the coda to a lifetime of extraordinary achievement, is to live out his final weeks, or perhaps months, with purpose and dignity before end-stage metastatic cancer ends his time on Earth. The cancer is a rare metastases from an eye tumor that cost him the vision in one eye some years ago.

Most people know Sacks from “Awakenings,” the book he wrote describing his research with the drug L-dopa to treat encephalitis lethargica. The disease spread around the globe between 1912 and 1928, leaving thousands of people paralyzed, some to the point of catatonia. In the early 1970s, Sacks came upon a nearly forgotten back ward of encephalitis patients in a Bronx hospital, people frozen in time and place, and began treating them with L-dopa. The results were startling: dramatic improvement, followed by slow and inevitable decline.

Sacks’s work became known to millions who saw the movie “Awakenings,” which starred Robert De Niro. De Niro portrayed a patient stricken with encephalitis, and Robin Williams played the good doctor. It was as if he channeled him. The Williams-Sacks matchup was one of those blessed pairings: two sweet, gentle men (in real life) whose brains flitted and zoomed and burned at warp speed, generating extraordinary performances, literary and comic and heartbreaking.

I know Dr. Sacks because, through his work, he helped me understand my paternal grandfather, William Bromberg, who contracted encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s and was “frozen,” and confined to a wheelchair, for the rest of his life. My father was a little boy when his father became sick and incapacitated, and the disease changed the path of the Bromberg family. My grandmother became the breadwinner, establishing and running an awning business in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that kept them all afloat. And she tapped my dad as the son most likely to succeed, begging and borrowing enough money to send him to college and pharmacy school and then dental school.

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