An Anthropologist On Mars
Essay Assignment

Oliver Sacks is a very famous doctor of neurology as well as a writer. He spent most of his adult life treating patients. Oliver Sacks mostly concentrated on disorders of the brain and nervous system. In a lot of the cases that Sacks dealt with, there was nothing he was able to do to heal the patients. His goal was to find a way to live with and accept their condition as well as possible. Sacks enjoyed dealing with cases mostly about experiences of real people struggling to live with unusual conditions. That’s where he wanted to find ways to help these patients to the best of his and medical ability out there. Throughout his cases he studied he came across patients who had different
Having a disease can take over your mind and body. You become a different individual, different person and act sometimes in way where people don’t believe a person can change in such a way. Having a disease where you lose your memory and forget stuff what occurred to you in your previous years, can affect you tremendously. You can act very immature, say things not according to your age or even do things that are also very odd. Greg, in the “Last Hippie”, acted very strangely his parents described once he got diagnosed with his disease. When his own parents would talk to him, they said he had odd responses and kind of replied with comments and phrases that made absolutely no sense what so ever, although, Greg had some memory left when he was around music. Greg remained trapped in a distant past because his memory of recent activities only lasts a few minutes. He would act normally, remember songs and get involved in conversations like healthy people would only when he was talking or listening to music.
In another Oliver Sack’s story “To See and Not See” he talks about a 55 year old man who had been blind since he was a child. Many doctors believed that his blindness resulted from a genetic condition and there was nothing able to be done. Although after numerous visit to different specialists, he found doctors who believed he may not be permanently blind. Virgil gets operated on one eye and slowly tries to recover and obtain his vision. Due to