The English neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015 at the age of 83, made the fusion of research and storytelling into a principle. With his mentor, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, he called it a “romantic science.”
In it, empathy is central. Sacks regarded his development in this direction as “inevitable,” for in the conversations of his parents and older brothers, all of whom were medical doctors, “cases always became biographies, stories about the lives of people who responded to illness or injury, stress or misfortune.” And thus he too became “a doctor and a storyteller.”
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and clearest signs of a culture that is about to descend into barbarism.”
The “MAGA culture” now views it differently, for example in a September 2025 speech to American students by Charlie Kirk, a Trump propagandist who was shot: “I cannot stand the word empathy. I believe empathy is an invented New Age word — and it causes great damage.”
Guilty Conscience
In a similar vein, US Vice President J. D. Vance and his mentor, tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, are convinced that the weakness of Christianity lies in love for others, i.e., empathy, because it makes the strong feel guilty.
In Denmark, empathy is a dedicated school subject for all students aged 6 to 16. Oliver Sacks, by contrast, was convinced: “You cannot teach empathy.” His lifelong pen-pal, the indefatigable speaker Jane Goodall, for whom “every real change begins with compassion,” would have disagreed with him.
The Sacks, who became a bestselling author through his clinical case studies, is regarded as “the embodiment of the compassionate physician” (“Ask not what disease a person has, but what person the disease has,” runs the motto of one of his storytelling collections). No wonder that his colleagues at home and abroad ignored his early books; only with his fame did this change. Ten years after his death appeared then, edited and annotated by his assistant Kate Edgar, 1,008 pages of “Letters” (2025).
Already at 27, at the beginning of his neurological work in a California hospital in 1960, Sacks criticized his colleagues almost from the patient’s perspective. In a letter to a friend in England he wrote: “There are simply too many doctors here who willingly hoodwink a patient by subjecting him to pointless examinations worth $1,000.”
Pseudoquantification of Findings
To his parents in the same year, Sacks wrote: “The old anecdotal days of medicine are gone — ‘I once had a patient’ — today one is increasingly compelled to obtain results that can be statistically ‘processed.’ Often this leads to an absurd pseudo-quantification of findings, which we must beware of.”
In 1970, Sacks taught students; to his parents he wrote: “I think I am a good teacher: not because I proclaim facts, but because, in a certain sense, I convey my passion for patients and their condition and give a sense of the ‘essence’ of patients, of how the symptoms intertwine with their whole being and how this in turn interlocks with the entire environment.”
Sacks finds the entire “medical jargon” dreadful. It does not convey a true picture, not the slightest sense of what it feels like—to be, say, a Parkinson’s patient. In “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1990) he added: “In a brief case history there is no ‘subject’—it is captured in modern history only with a superficial description (‘a trisomic, female albino of 21 years’), which could apply to a rat as well as to a human.”
To a literary critic he wrote in 1972 that it took him many years to learn to listen to Parkinsonism patients and others, and to try to place himself in their experiential world. “Today this empathic-metaphysical method is proscribed by a categorical prohibition; today one pedantically insists on definitions and numbers and facts.”
In 1966 he saw his first Parkinson patient: “The former librarian had a look on his face that was at once exceedingly tense and exceedingly distant, but I could not imagine his condition in the slightest until he whispered the word ‘Panther’ and brought to mind Rilke’s ‘Panther.’”
In it he is quoted: “It seems to him there are a thousand bars / and behind a thousand bars no world. (…) / Only sometimes the curtain of the pupil / glides noiselessly aside. Then a picture enters, / passes through the tense stillness of the limbs — / and ceases to be in the heart.”
To his brother Samuel, a practical physician, Sacks wrote in 1974 that medicine had lost much of its luster: “Terms like ‘nursing’ and ‘care’ have practically vanished and have been replaced by a pedantic passion for new drugs, procedures, methods, techniques.”
In 1985 Sacks wrote to feminist science critic Evelyn Fox Keller that he had heard a dogmatic lecture by the molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg “that left him with a kind of horror, the feeling: And ‘that’—Lederberg’s ‘program’—is all that the natural sciences have to offer? That triggered a kind of crisis in me—indeed, if one wants to put it this way, a crisis of ‘love’. For what I do, I think, or at least hope, is almost always inspired by love and a product of love; and even though there have been some intense personal relationships in my life, since childhood it has also been nurtured by ‘a loving relation to the world’ with warmth. I find Lederberg’s ‘philosophy’ deeply unsettling—but not as unsettling as the lovelessness underlying it.”
She reminded him of a man who was “extremely intelligent, cold and precise” and who told him: “Love? What do you mean by ‘loving’? What do you mean when you say your patients are ‘dear’ to you? What is ‘dear’? What is ‘loving’? That does not exist in the world!”
Sacks froze. “Sometimes he asked himself whether one should not distinguish a ‘technical’ from a ‘visionary’ science.” He feared that a majority of his colleagues “now think like molecular biologists.”
