Suzanne O'Sullivan on Oliver Sacks
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Parris meets Suzanne O'Sullivan to discuss her medical and literary hero, Oliver Sacks.
She first came across his work on a beach in Thailand, reading his famous collection of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Joining the discussion is Sacks' partner, the writer and photographer Bill Hayes. Together they discuss the career of a gifted medic and writer who also loved motorbikes and wild swimming. Sacks wrote another extraordinary book, Awakenings, which was made into a film starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro.
Suzanne O'Sullivan is an Irish neurologist and award winning author.
Producer: Chris Ledgard
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2019.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
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| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, |
| 0:24.6 | you're doing the wrong thing. |
| 0:26.0 | Julie, at your service, listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.0 | Our subject today is a man who's pictured on the cover of his autobiography, |
| 0:41.8 | a stride a huge BMW motor bike in jeans and a black leather jacket. |
| 0:47.2 | He sounds like a Hollywood hunk who achieved fame for some kind of physical prowess or daring do. In fact, he was a doctor who was fascinated |
| 0:56.5 | by the most intricate of medical specializations and a branch of knowledge in whose foothills |
| 1:01.8 | we still remain the workings of the brain and the nervous system. |
| 1:06.0 | Today's great life is the neurologist Oliver Sachs. |
| 1:10.0 | Now Oliver Sachs has been chosen by a fellow neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan who joins me in the studio. |
| 1:17.6 | Suzanne's a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, now based at the National Hospital for |
| 1:22.0 | Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. |
| 1:25.0 | An expert in epilepsy, she is, like Saxe, an author too. |
| 1:29.0 | Her latest book being Brainstorm, Detective Stories from the world of neurology. |
| 1:34.0 | Suzanne, first things first, because I suspect some listeners are a bit hazy, as am I. |
| 1:39.0 | What exactly in a nutshell is neurology? |
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