A Leg to Stand On

“A Leg as a Point of Support” is the most unusual of Sacks’s “clinical” works. Its peculiarity is that a well-known scholar, as a result of an accident, ends up himself in the role of a patient.

However, Oliver Sacks’s autobiographical work is not a routine story of illness and recovery. Instead, it is a living, engaging, and intelligent account of human relationships—physical, psychological, and existential aspects of illness and the struggle against it—and above all, the physiological component of a person’s identity.