If music be the food of health…

Oliver Sacks is a famed neurologist whose books of case studies combine the latest neuroscience with deep humanistic learning. He not only describes his patients with great precision, but also seeks to enter empathically into their experience and then, by means of limpid prose, to communicate it to the general reader. Ever since the publication of his book Awakenings, about patients with encephalitis lethargica who were recalled to life by the drug levodopa after decades of immobility, he has deservedly found a large and appreciative audience. He has had many imitators but no equals.

Case studies are not favoured in contemporary medical literature as they once were. True, medical journals such as the famed New England Journal of Medicine carry case reports of rare diseases or unusual presentations; but after a brief summary of the patient’s symptoms, there follows a vast array of hi-tech laboratory and imaging data, ending with a triumphantly clever diagnosis (even if it is made only at post mortem).