by Oliver Sacks
His sense of loss, of hopeless nostalgia, deepened each year. “Ah!” he wrote in 1828,
Could I recover anything like that freshness of mind, which I possessed at twenty-five…what would I not give!…How well I remember that delightful season, when, full of power, I sought for power in others; and power was sympathy, and sympathy power;—when the dead and the unknown, the great of other ages and distant places, were made, by the force of the imagination, my companions and friends.
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IN 1826, Davy’s mother died. He was singularly attached to her, as Newton had been to his mother, and her death affected him grievously. Later that year, at the age of forty-eight, he suffered, as his father had at the same age, a transient numbness in his hand and arm, and weakness in his leg, followed by a paralytic stroke. Though he recovered speedily, the gravity of this, and its undeniable import, altered his thinking. He suddenly felt sick of the endless struggles at the Royal Society, the endless obligations of his worldly life: “My health was gone, my ambition satisfied, I was no longer excited by the desire of distinction; what I regarded most tenderly was in the grave.”
One of Davy’s recreations, perhaps his only one, throughout his adult life, had been fishing. Otherwise distracted, or pompous, or unapproachable, he would regain all his old friendliness, his real self, when fishing. This was the time when his mind became youthful and fresh once again, and he could delight, as he used to, in the pure play of ideas. Over the years Davy, an expert fisherman, became equally expert in his knowledge of flies and fishes. One of his final, meditative books, Salmonia, is at once a natural history, an allegory, a dialogue, a poem; Knight calls it “a fishing book suffused with natural theology.”
After completing the book, Davy set sail for Slovenia, accompanied by his godson John Tobin, the last of his scientific “sons.” Out of England and its climate, which, Davy felt, kept “the nervous system in a constant state of disturbance,” he might hope to receive, to enjoy, and to communicate his final thoughts: “I had sought for and found consolation, and partly recovered my health after a dangerous illness…I had found the spirit of my early vision….Nature never deceives us; the rocks, the mountains, the streams, always speak the same language.”
After his final, mortal stroke, in February 1829, he dictated this letter, his Nunc Dimittis:
I am dying from a severe attack of palsy, which has seized the whole of the body, with the exception of the intellectual organ….I bless God that I have been able to finish my intellectual labours.
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I HAVE SAID THAT Humphry Davy was a boyhood hero to virtually everyone interested in chemistry or science in my generation. We all knew and repeated his famous experiments, imagining ourselves in his place. Davy himself had had such ideal companions in his youth, particularly Newton and Lavoisier. Newton, for him, was a sort of god; but Lavoisier was closer, more like a father with whom he could talk, agree, disagree. His own first essay, which Beddoes had published, while taking strong issue with Lavoisier, was in effect a dialogue with him. All of us need such figures, such ego ideals, and need them throughout life.*9
Now I find to my dismay that when I speak to my younger scientific friends, none of them has heard of Davy, and some of them are puzzled when I tell them of my interest. It is difficult for them to imagine what relevance such “old” science can have. Science, it is often said, is impersonal, consists of “information” and “concepts”; these advance by a process of revision and replacement in which old information and old concepts become obsolete. In this view, the science of the past is irrelevant to the present, of interest only to the historian or psychologist.
But this is not what I have found in reality: when I came to write my first book, Migraine, in 1967, I was stimulated by the nature of the malady and by encounters with my patients, but equally, and crucially, by an “old” book on the subject, Edward Liveing’s Megrim, written in the 1870s. I took this book out of the rarely entered historical section of the medical school library and read it, cover to cover, in a sort of rapture. I reread it many times for six months, and I got to know Liveing extremely well. His presence and his way of thinking were continually with me. My prolonged encounter with Liveing was crucial for the generation of my own thoughts and book. It was just such an encounter with Humphry Davy, when I was twelve, that had originally confirmed me on the path to science. How could I believe that the history of science, the past, was irrelevant?
I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.
*1 . This included a wonderful account of the effects of inhaling the fumes of nitrous oxide—“laughing gas”—which in its psychological perspicacity is reminiscent of William James’s own account of the same experience, a century later. It is perhaps the first description of a psychedelic experience in Western literature:
A thrilling extending from the chest to the extremities was almost immediately produced…my visible impressions were dazzling and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room….As the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorised; I imagined that I made discoveries.
Davy also discovered that nitrous oxide was an anesthetic and suggested its use in surgical operations. He never followed up on this, and general anesthesia was introduced only in the 1840s, after his death. (Freud, in the 1880s, was similarly careless of his own discovery that cocaine was a local anesthetic—and the credit for this discovery is usually given to others.)
*2 . In Coleridge’s words,
Water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal…are convoked and fraternized by the theory of the chemist….It is the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature….If in a Shakespeare we find nature idealized into poetry…so through the meditative observation of a Davy…we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature: yea, nature itself disclosed to us,…as at once the poet and the poem!
*3 . Coleridge was not the only poet to renew his stock of metaphors with images from chemistry. The chemical phrase “elective affinities” was given an erotic connotation by Goethe; “energy” became, for Blake, “eternal delight”; Keats, trained in medicine, also reveled in chemical metaphors.
Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” employs chemical metaphors from beginning to end, culminating in a grand, Davyan metaphor for the poet’s mind: “The analogy is that of the catalyst….The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.” One wonders whether Eliot knew that his central metaphor, catalysis, was discovered by Humphry Davy in 1816.
*4 . Davy was so startled by the inflammability of sodium and potassium, and their ability to float on water, that he wondered whether there might not be deposits of these beneath the earth’s crust, which, exploding upon the impact of water, were responsible for volcanic eruptions.
*5 . The term “scientist” did not exist in 1812. The great historian of science William Whewell devised it in 1834.
*6 . Davy had been reluctant, up to this point, to believe that diamond and charcoal were, in fact, one and the same element; h
e felt this was “against the analogies of Nature.” It was perhaps his weakness, as well as his strength, that he sometimes thought to classify the chemical world by concrete qualities, not formal properties. (For the most part—as with the alkali metals and the halogens—concrete qualities correspond to formal properties; it is rather rare for elements to have a number of quite different physical forms.)
*7 . Davy went on with his investigations of flame and, a year after the safety lamp, published “Some New Researches on Flame.” More than forty years later, Faraday would return to the subject, in his famous 1861 Royal Institution lecture series on The Chemical History of a Candle.
*8 . This was my own introduction to Humphry Davy as a child, when my mother took me to the Science Museum in London, up to the top floor where there was a very realistic simulacrum of a nineteenth-century coal mine. She showed me the Davy lamp, and explained how it made it safer to work in coal mines; then she showed me another safety lamp, the Landau lamp. “My father, your grandfather, invented this,” she said, “when he was a young man in 1869. It was even safer than the original design, and came to replace the Davy lamp.” I felt a thrill of identification. I had then the sense—childish, but very vivid—of science as a completely human business: influences, conversations, across the ages.
*9 . The general theme of ego ideals, and the universal need for them, is especially explored in the opening chapter (“Making Great Men Ours”) of Leonard Shengold’s book The Boy Will Come to Nothing! Freud’s Ego Ideal and Freud as Ego Ideal.
Libraries
When I was a child, my favorite place at home was the library, a large oak-paneled room with all four walls covered by bookcases—and a solid table for writing and studying in the middle. It was here that my father had his special collection of books, as a Hebrew scholar; here, too, were all of Ibsen’s plays (my parents had originally met in a medical students’ Ibsen society); here, on a single shelf, were the young poets of my father’s generation, many killed in the Great War; and here, on the lower shelves so I could easily reach them, were the adventure and history books belonging to my three older brothers. It was here that I found Kipling’s Jungle Book; I identified deeply with Mowgli and used his adventures as a taking-off point for my own fantasies.
My mother had her favorite volumes in a separate bookcase in the lounge—Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray, Bernard Shaw’s plays in pale green bindings, as well as an entire set of Kipling bound in soft red morocco. There was a beautiful three-volume set of Shakespeare’s works, a gilt-edged Milton, and other books, mostly poetry, that my mother had got as school prizes.
Medical books were kept in a special locked cabinet in my parents’ consulting room (but the key was in the door, so it was easy to unlock).
The oak-paneled library was the quietest and most beautiful room in the house, to my eyes, and it vied with my little chemistry lab as my favorite place to be. I would curl up in a chair and become so absorbed in what I was reading that all sense of time would be lost. Whenever I was late for lunch or dinner I could be found, completely enthralled by a book, in the library. I learned to read early, at three or four, and books, and our library, are among my first memories.
But the ur-library, for me, was our local public library, the Willesden library. There I spent many of the happiest hours of my growing-up years—our house was a five-minute walk from the library—and it was there I received my real education.
On the whole, I disliked school, sitting in class, receiving instruction; information seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I could not be passive—I had to be active, learn for myself, learn what I wanted, and in the way that suited me best. I was not a good pupil, but I was a good learner, and in the Willesden library—and all the libraries that came later—I roamed the shelves and stacks, had the freedom to select whatever I wanted, to follow paths that fascinated me, to become myself. At the library I felt free—free to look at the thousands, tens of thousands, of books; free to roam and to enjoy the special atmosphere and the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own.
As I got older, my reading was increasingly biased towards the sciences, especially astronomy and chemistry. St. Paul’s School, where I went when I was twelve, had an excellent general library, the Walker Library, which was particularly heavy in history and politics—but it could not provide all of the science and, especially, chemistry books I now hungered for. But with a special testimonial from one of the school masters, I was able to get a ticket to the library of the Science Museum, and there I devoured the many volumes of Mellor’s Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry and the even longer Gmelin Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry.
When I went to university, I had access to Oxford’s two great university libraries, the Radcliffe Science Library and the Bodleian, a wonderful general library that could trace itself back to 1602. It was in the Bodleian that I stumbled upon the now-obscure and forgotten works of Theodore Hook, a man greatly admired in the early nineteenth century for his wit and his prolific genius for theatrical and musical improvisation. I became so fascinated by Hook that I decided to write a sort of biography or “case history” of him. No other library—apart from the British Museum’s library—could have provided the materials I needed, and the tranquil atmosphere of the Bodleian was a perfect one in which to write.
But the library I most loved at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, were the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me—I particularly adored Gesner’s Historiae Animalium (1551), richly illustrated with many wonderful engravings, including Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros, and Agassiz’s four-volume work on fossil fishes. It was there, too, that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions, and it was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut and thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions. While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s College library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—Johnson, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.
I first came to New York City in 1965, and at that time I had a horrid, poky little apartment in which there were almost no surfaces to read or write on. I was just able, holding an elbow awkwardly aloft, to write some of Migraine on the top of the refrigerator. I longed for spaciousness. Fortunately, the library at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I worked, had this in abundance. I would sit at a large table to read or write for a while, and then wander around the shelves and stacks. I never knew what my eyes might alight upon, but I would sometimes discover unexpected treasures, lucky finds, and bring these back to my seat.
Though the library was quiet, whispered conversations might start in the stacks—two of you, perhaps, were searching for the same old book, the same bound volumes of Brain from 1890—and conversations could lead to friendships. All of us in the library were reading our own books, absorbed in our own worlds, and yet there was a sense of community, even intimacy. The physicality of books—along with their places and their neighbors on the bookshelves—was part of this camaraderie: handling books, sharing them, passing them to one another, even seeing the nam
es of previous readers and the dates they took books out.
But a shift was occurring by the 1990s. I would continue to visit the library frequently, sitting at a table with a mountain of books in front of me, but students increasingly ignored the bookshelves, accessing what they needed with their computers. Few of them went to the shelves anymore. The books, so far as they were concerned, were unnecessary. And since the majority of users were no longer using the books themselves, the college decided, ultimately, to dispose of them.
I had no idea that this was happening—not only in the Einstein library but in college and public libraries all over the country. I was horrified when I visited the library recently and found the shelves, once overflowing, now sparsely occupied. Over the last few years, most of the books, it seems, have been thrown out, with remarkably little objection from anyone. I felt that a murder, a crime had been committed: the destruction of centuries of knowledge. Seeing my distress, a librarian reassured me that everything “of worth” had been digitized. But I do not use a computer, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of books, even bound periodicals, for there is something irreplaceable about a physical book: its look, its smell, its heft. I thought of how the library once cherished “old” books, had a special room for old and rare books; and how in 1967, rummaging through the stacks, I had found an 1873 book, Edward Liveing’s Megrim, which inspired me to write my own first book.
