Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a doctor. He was born and grew up in London, but since the mid-60s has lived and worked in America.

In 1969, he treated catatonic patients with the drug L-Doper, and briefly and miraculously they came back to life.

The book he wrote about the incident, Awakenings, inspired the film starring Robert DeNiro

and Robin Williams. He's written other books too.

Although now a distinguished professor of neurology,

he's reached out beyond the frontiers of medicine

with his humane and literary accounts of his patients illnesses.

He is Dr. Oliver Sachs.

Dr. Sachs, some of the case histories

you've written about are our strange beyond belief.

Do you listen to the descriptions of their symptoms when they come to see you and think, my goodness, this is a good story? I mean, not like a journalist.

At first, I don't. At first, I'm faced by a human being in trouble, although also a human being

who's trying to articulate something which he can't understand and which is strange beyond

imagination.

Often at some point, the idea may come to me.

This will be a good story or worth telling.

Let's take one of your most famous cases then, Dr P, the man who mistook his wife for

a hat.

He in fact did that very thing in front of you in your room, didn't he?

Oh yes indeed he could see things clearly, but he couldn't interpret them. He got the meaning wrong.

...