If music be the food of health…

Oliver Sacks is a famed neurologist whose books of case studies combine the latest neuroscience with deep humanistic learning. He not only describes his patients with great precision, but also seeks to enter empathically into their experience and then, by means of limpid prose, to communicate it to the general reader. Ever since the publication of his book Awakenings, about patients with encephalitis lethargica who were recalled to life by the drug levodopa after decades of immobility, he has deservedly found a large and appreciative audience. He has had many imitators but no equals.

Case studies are not favoured in contemporary medical literature as they once were. True, medical journals such as the famed New England Journal of Medicine carry case reports of rare diseases or unusual presentations; but after a brief summary of the patient’s symptoms, there follows a vast array of hi-tech laboratory and imaging data, ending with a triumphantly clever diagnosis (even if it is made only at post mortem). In these case reports, the patient seems almost to have only a walk-on part. His job is to provide brilliant and erudite doctors with an opportunity to display their arcane erudition.

While Sacks is perfectly au fait with the latest research, and is no enemy of technological brio, he also belongs to an older and more leisurely medical tradition, namely that of very detailed history-taking and analysis of what the patient says about his own experiences of his condition. His case histories sometimes read like those of the 19th-century French psychiatrists, who are now largely forgotten, but who not only wrote most beautifully, elegantly and clearly, but were also masters of the art of finding significance in seeming trifles.

In his latest book, Sacks turns his attention to the neurology and pathology of music (it comes as no surprise to learn that he himself is something of a pianist, and plays Chopin on his father’s 1894 Bechstein grand).