OLIVER SACKS: HOUSE CALLS AT THE EDGE OF THE MIND

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The hospitals that later employed Sacks would never do as sets for a TV-doc opera. He has worked for years under drab and underfunded conditions, treating cases that most physicians rarely see: Tourette's syndrome, which can cause uncontrollable tics and twitches and outbursts of profanity; or brain injuries that preserve old memories but prevent the forming of new ones.

Sacks frequently befriends the people in his care. He brings them souvenirs from his travels and calls long distance to see how they are doing. "He is probably the most caring, sensitive doctor that we have ever met," says Sister Theresa Robertson of New York City's Little Sisters of the Poor, a home for the aged. It's an unglamorous practice that Sacks maintains despite his considerable financial success. He has little regard for status. There are no diplomas on the walls of his Greenwich Village office. He has lost track of where his credentials are. Politics and organizations are to be avoided also. "The only memberships I enjoy," he says, "are in the British Pteridological Society and the American Fern Society."

Both as man and model, Oliver Sacks has obvious appeal. He is descended from a line of literary physicians-from Chekhov to Jonathan Miller, the late Lewis Thomas and, perhaps most significantly, the Russian neurologist A.R. Luria, whose neurohistorical writings helped introduce the public to the mysteries of the brain.

But Sacks is especially engaging at a time of highly specialized, technical and increasingly impersonal medicine. Who, these days, wouldn't want a warm, erudite physician, one who might prescribe a cat as well as a CAT scan? Who could resist bragging about My Doctor the Writer? Certainly not those whose lives he honors in his books.

--Reported by Sharon E. Epperson/New York