atma 0 Report post Posted December 27, 2001 This is from a review of a new book by Oliver Sacks: "Sacks grew up in a north London as part of a large, intellectually vigorous Jewish family. His parents were doctors, and there was no question that Sacks was also going to be a doctor - preferably a surgeon. When he was just 11, his mother an obstetrician, encouraged him to this end by bringing home stillborn foetuses to dissect. A cheerful dissector of worms and frogs, Sacks admits that he was deeply disturbed at being expected to do the same with sometimes horribly deformed babies. At 14, his mother sent him off to a proper anatomy class: an oilskin was pulled back on the cadaver of a young girl and he was told to get started on the nearest leg. Sacks writes: 'I did not know if I would ever be able to love the warm, quick bodies of the living after facing, smelling, cutting the formalin-reeking corpse of a girl my own age.' And indeed, it seems, he didn't." (elsewhere in the review it says that he is celibate Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
