Science loses its best poet, or vice versa !

Perhaps he realized that life is not a script already written and that the disease has nothing sacred and immutable. Certainly he has tried to give man the courage to get up from falls every time you can also waking from the darker and most annihilating sleep. Sacks was a brilliant mind, a man with many interests and talents. A neurologist-psychiatrist-writer and much more. So far a precious gift, but not so rare and unique. The added value consisted in Sack's ability to disseminate his ideas and sharing them with all, so that everyone could feel them as their own, like children, like fruits of a tree each one planted and cared.
He had the ability to make clear that you do not need to be a supermen to give men the will to seek a most worthy and profound condition, even in pain. He himself was a man with a personal experience marked by childhood trauma, mental illness, drug use and other adventures and misadventures. But he has always kept alive the passion for music, sports, motorcycle and many other activities creatively useful and useless, and therefore beautiful, by definition. He was able to think beyond the fences, to dare and apply the full range of human perceptions. Thus he enriched with new meanings the term "empathy." Fame came to him first as a writer and later a scientist, with the 1985 book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" (brilliantly surreal and realistic at the same time, already from the title), which was performed in London in 1986. Then came in the 1990 the film "Awakenings" based on his book with the same title, brought to success by Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
Where the scientist ends and the writer starts is unknown, and perhaps it does not matter. There remains a dowry of a wealth of knowledge based on clinical observation, his pioneering work with the mentally ill and the idea that it is possible to cultivate a holistic approach to life which combines science, art and humanity, mind and spirit, smile and poetry. 


Because after all we sometimes exchange our wife or what we love for a hat. But, looking ourselves in the eye and inside, within our own mind and with others, can mean, thanks to the words of this authentic and atypical scientist-artist, find it, and, finally, find ourselves.
“I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts”. Oliver Sacks

Ivano Mugnaini