Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, was apparently a doctor who mistook his patients for fictional characters. The celebrated neurologist who taught generations to see the poetry in damaged brains invented a lot of that poetry himself.

According to a devastating new investigation by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker, many of the vivid details in Sacks’s beloved case studies were fabrications — embellishments designed to make better stories.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who could spontaneously generate multi-digit prime numbers? The paralyzed patient who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up, or at least heavily enhanced. In his own journals, Sacks admitted he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he acknowledged, were “pure fabrications.”

Sacks helped found the field of medical humanities, and his case studies were treated as scientific data. The twins’ supposed prime-number abilities were “widely cited” in academic literature. Medical schools assigned his books. The whole notion that doctors should see patients as narrative beings, not just bundles of symptoms, drew heavily from his work.

Sacks spent decades in therapy exploring why he couldn’t stop embellishing. He called his writing “symbolic autobiography” — projecting his own psychological conflicts onto patients. The healer who saw the hidden genius in broken minds was, in some sense, trying to heal himself through fiction he labeled fact.

Previously:
• Oliver Sacks on face blindness
• Gweek 075: Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations
• Oliver Sacks: I have terminal cancer
• Brain Rules: Oliver Sacks meets GETTING THINGS DONE
• Over six percent of us experience ‘phantom odor perception’
• Oliver Sacks on drugs

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