Sacks' Migraine - no headache to read

We tend to assume that good literature is fiction and poetry and drama. However, there are works of nonfiction that are gems of good writing and reading them gives as much pleasure as would any novel.

Books by Oliver Sacks cover a variety of areas, all more or less related to his field - medicine, in general, and neurology, in particular. He writes about medical conditions in an engaging style.

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival. © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons

His books are, basically, case histories. It is the way he narrates things that takes what might be dry-as-dust and makes it fascinating to read. Migraine, 1970, is his first book but rather hefty in size. 

I've suffered from bad headaches for years and a lot of folks I know, especially women, endure terrible migraines. Sacks had his first one when he was just three or four years old!

“I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left—dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then, behind the brightness, came a blindness, an emptiness in my field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified—what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but those were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.“

A Perspective on the Migraine Mind 

 “My firstborn, written in a burst (nine days!) in 1967, stimulated in part by working in a migraine clinic and in part by a wonderful book (Liveing’s On Megrim) written a century earlier.”

oliversacks.com

 

It would do anybody great good to have several Oliver Sacks books at home but those who suffer migraines would be especially grateful to get to read it.