I always pay attention when my mind returns repeatedly to
certain themes. On reading Oliver Sacks’ new autobiography, On the Move, I was struck by his
observation that many smart, technically-trained people seem to care little
about history -- even the history of thought and discovery within their own
professional fields. Sacks takes the opposite view – along with other highly
productive investigators such as the late Harvard neurologist Norman Geschwind –
who found insightful and useful observations in relatively early literature.
“At UCLA,” says Sacks, “we residents had a weekly ‘Journal
Club’; we would read the latest papers in neurology and discuss them. I
sometimes annoyed the group, I think, by saying that we should also discuss the
writings of our nineteenth-century forebears, relating what we were seeing in
patients to their observations and
thoughts. This was seen by the others as archaism; we were short of time, and
we had better things to do than consider such ‘obsolete’ matters. This attitude
was reflected, implicitly, in many of the journal articles we read; they made
little reference to anything more that five years old. It was as if neurology had no history.”
“I found this dismaying,” says Sacks, “for I think in
narrative and historical terms. As a chemistry-mad boy, I devoured books on the
history of chemistry, the evolution of its ideas, and the lives of my favorite
chemists. . . . It was similar when my interests moved from chemistry to
biology. Here, of course, my central passion was for Darwin. . . . I loved his
autobiography most of all.” (Page 102.)
So much of my own research for In the Mind’s Eye was based on the historical perspectives
elaborated by Norman Geschwind and his student Albert Galaburda in Cerebral Lateralization and elsewhere.
It also happens that the dyslexic molecular biologist at Caltech, the late William
J. Dreyer, no lover of long books, contacted me, became a close friend and gave
me just two books – a history of molecular biology that explains his heretical
discovery of deep fundamentals in this new field – and his own favorite book,
the autobiography of Charles Darwin.
It is as if the longer view of history helps the truly
creative and innovative thinker to move beyond the clutter and fashion of their
own time to make genuine contributions to expanding human understandings. Those
with the short view, however brilliant (their heads full of current data), seem
blinded and locked into the belief structure of their own narrow time –
whatever its flaws, limitations and wrong-headed approaches.
My own current favorite is Darwin’s Armada in which Australian author Iain McCalman tells the
story of how four long sea voyages (by Darwin, Hooker, Wallace and Huxley)
provided a radical new heretical perspective on the natural world – and how the
four fought and eventually joined to “Battle for the Theory of Evolution.”
