SOURCE: Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. “Oliver Sacks's Awakenings: Reshaping Clinical Discourse.” Configurations 1, no. 2 (spring 1993): 229-45.

In the following essay, Hawkins describes Sacks's trajective approach to clinical experience found in Awakenings.

The Metaphor of Trajective Discourse

“My ideal doctor,” wrote the late Anatole Broyard, “would be my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we go. He would resemble Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I can imagine Dr. Sacks entering my condition, looking around at it from the inside like a benevolent landlord with a tenant, trying to see how he could make the premises more livable for me. He would see the genius of my illness. He would mingle his daemon with mine: we would wrestle with my fate together.”¹ At first glance, Virgil and Sacks—Dante's imagined guide in the...