Summary
Mrs. B., the feature of “Yes, Father-Sister,” is a former research chemist whose personality changes suddenly after a large tumor develops in her frontal cortex. She is high-spirited and volatile, full of quips and wisecracks. When she meets with Sacks, Mrs. B interchangeably calls him “Father,” “Sister” and “Doctor,” respectively because of his beard, his white uniform and his stethoscope. When asked why she does this, she says “I know the difference, but it means nothing to me. Father, sister, doctor–what’s the big deal?” (116.)
She demonstrates a similar apathy towards the difference between left and right, which makes it difficult for Sacks to test whether she can accurately discriminate between the two. Often she says the wrong answer just to be funny. She reports that reality has become completely meaningless to her, which shocks and troubles Dr. Sacks. Mrs. B, however, is not perturbed at all.
“The Possessed,” the last essay of Excesses, is a short vignette about a grey-haired woman in her sixties who Sacks encounters on the streets of New York City. Sacks classifies her as a super-Touretter: one whose tics are so constant and forceful that they have entirely subsumed her being. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, the woman is doing ludicrous, exaggerated impressions of each person who walks past. After “a build-up of pressures,” the woman turns into an alley and, with the appearance of being violently ill, expels a furious string of abbreviated and accelerated versions of every gesture, posture, expression, and demeanor of the forty-to-fifty people who had passed.
Sacks writes that after spending hundreds of hours talking to Tourette’s patients, nothing taught him as much about the condition than this two-minute display on the sidewalk. “There is… an existential, almost a theological pressure upon the soul of a Touretter–whether it can be held whole and sovereign, or whether it can be taken over, possessed and dispossessed, by every immediacy and impulse” (124).
Analysis
Mrs. B.’s former career as a chemist is an apt symbol for the tension Sacks feels between those who experience neurological disorders of excess and those who study it. A woman who once studied chemical reactions in a sense becomes a sort of chemical reaction herself, speaking and acting impulsively with no concern for how she affects those around her. The fact that someone previously so committed to the objective world would suddenly completely abscond with it clearly rattles Sacks, and we can see that Sacks takes the brunt of Mrs. B.’s anti-rationality. Stung by Mrs. B.’s indifference towards his identity, Sacks eventually asks her directly: “What am I?” (116.) This is a quintessential image of Sacks’ distress: asking his patient not who he is, but what he is to them. What is Dr. Sacks in relation to these patients? A healer? A counselor? A self-appointed arbitrator of reality? Sometimes the only thing he can be is an observer and an author of his patients’ stories, even if only for his own sake.
When Sacks is standing out on the street watching the super-Touretter take on the face of every person she sees, he is staring into a kind of warped mirror. After all, he is essentially doing the same thing as this woman. Like the woman puts on many faces, Sacks writes about his many patients as a mode of self-expression. “The Possessed,” then, takes on a double meaning: it describes the woman possessed by her illness, but it also describes Sacks, who is possessed by the scene unfolding in front of him -- so much so that he will later write at length about it and turn it into a chapter of his book. Although in many of this section’s essays Sacks finds himself at a loss as a neurologist, he rediscovers himself as a writer: one among the possessed.
