the spotlight according to the need of the hour. This strengthens his hypothesis that any “disease” introduces a “doubleness” into life, since every condition comes with its own set of demands and challenges. However, while we often think of this doubleness as a destructive force, Sacks notes that it can actually be a creative, constructive impetus.

Visiting Dr. Bennett in his idyllic small town in British Columbia, Sacks details Dr. Bennett’s Tourette’s in vivid detail to acquaint the reader with its scope. Bennett, a loving husband and father of two, is prone to grabbing his son’s head rigidly, imploring him to “look” at him. He blurts out words and phrases like “hideous,” and “Hi Patty!” repeatedly, needs to square and center objects in his line of sight, and takes sudden dips, darts, and hops. However, showy and performative as the Tourette’s can be, it is not the most extraordinary thing about Dr. Bennett. What is extraordinary is the way the Tourette’s is an ordinary and normal part of Bennett’s psyche and his functional life. Doctors, nurses, and patients at his hospital do not blink an eyelid as Dr Bennett lies in the waiting room with his colleagues, often touching their shoulder with his foot. In a warm, comic sequence, he breaks into a series of tics before removing a melanoma from a woman’s buttock, while the patient looks on with a straight face. When Dr. Bennett performs a complex hours-long mastectomy, Sacks is amazed to observe the fluidity with which the Tourette’s stays out of his way.

The operation was often complex—vessels to be tied, nerves to be found—but the action was confident, smooth, moving forward at its own pace, with never the slightest hint of Tourette's. Finally, after two and a half hours of the most complex, taxing surgery, Bennett closed up, thanked everybody, yawned, and stretched. Here, then, was an entire operation without a trace of Tourette's.

This is not because Dr. Bennett tries to control Tourette’s in any way, as he himself explains to Sacks, but simply because he does not feel the need to “tic.” In other words, his entire neurobiology seems to align itself with his identity as a surgeon during an operation. Thus, the Tourette’s acts not as an inhibitor but as a partner at such times, almost as if it were an understanding, loving spouse, illustrating a metaphor Sacks had introduced earlier in the essay to explain Tourette’s.

The Tourette's and the self shape themselves each to the other, come more and more to complement each other, until finally, like a long-married couple, they become a single, compound being.

This point is particularly important in the management of Tourette’s: instead of viewing the condition as a “disease,” it can be seen as a compliment. This view is particularly useful with a misunderstood syndrome like Tourette’s, which Sacks notes has been viewed with suspicion and hostility throughout history. While in the middle ages, someone with advanced Tourette’s was no doubt seen as “possessed,” the condition was not viewed favorably even till the 20th century.

Yet in the years after its first delineation, Tourette's tended to be seen not as an organic but as a "moral" disease—an expression of mischievousness or weakness of the will, to be treated by rectifying the will.

In Dr. Bennett’s case, the knowledge of his own differentness has strengthened his empathy towards his patients, as Sacks observes in the way he deals with a young mechanic with a disfiguring condition. Bennett is recognized in the ward as the most “compassionate” surgeon around; a qualitative which undoubtedly has something to do with his own experience.

Finally, Sacks suggests that Dr. Bennett’s Tourette Syndrome is part of his unique, high-energy personality and cannot be separated from him without undoing him any more than his surgery-performing fingers. Although Dr. Bennett’s condition has its own sets of challenges—such as his obsessive anxiety, his self-confessed difficulty in reading texts in medical school—it is also in continuum with the self that performs operations and flies planes. "It will be a novel experience. I am the world's only flying Touretter-surgeon," Dr. Bennett tells Sacks before flying them to Calgary airfield for Sacks' drop-off. At the end of the day, Dr. Bennett is wholly himself, as attested by two young pilots whom he meets before saying goodbye to Sacks.

He leaps out with a startling, tic-like suddenness and celerity—I follow at a slower, "normal" pace—and starts talking with two giant young men on the tarmac, Kevin and Chuck, brothers, both fourth-generation pilots in the Rockies. They know him well. "He's just one of us," Chuck says to me. "A regular guy. Tourette's—what the hell? He's a good human being. A damn good pilot, too."

In this essay, Dr. Oliver Sacks examines the life of a doctor, whom he calls Carl Bennett (which is not the doctor's real name). Bennett has Tourette's Syndrome, a disorder that causes him to have verbal and physical tics and compulsions, such as the need to touch a glass lampshade.

Sacks describes Tourette's as a "disease of disinhibition" and speaks about the way in which Dr. Bennett must compulsively respond to obsessive worries. For example, if he hears about a child getting lost, he will compulsively recenter his glasses and make noises that sound like an owl hooting. His compulsions and obsessions make it difficult for him even to read, as he has to balance the page and balance the sounds and words. The only time Dr. Bennett can read fluently is when he is exercising on a stationary bike while puffing on his pipe. He has no idea where some of the words he repeats come from, though he is attracted to words with strange sounds. 

Despite these problems, the doctor is a fine surgeon. In fact, when he is operating, he does not show any sign of having Tourette's. However, his syndrome often causes him so much panic and rage that he flings things in his house and jabs his walls with a knife. The doctor thinks of his Tourette's as primitive urges being released, and he thinks of his tics as part of himself, rather than as a disease. His wife is equally accepting. Though he takes Prozac to cure himself of some of the rages of his disorder, he accepts having Tourette's as part of who he is.

In the chapter “A Surgeon’s Life,” Oliver Sacks further develops one of the main themes of An Anthropologist on Mars by examining a spectacular case of an individual who is not only able to overcome a mental difference but thrive in his profession partially because of it. This is similar to Sacks's close analyses of Mr. I, the colorblind painter who undergoes a renaissance due to his unique visual perspective, as well as Temple Grandin, an engineer whose autism increases her understanding of herd animals and their environments.

Just as many might scoff at the idea of a colorblind painter, many might also doubt the skill of a surgeon with Tourette “Tourette Syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations called tics” (taken from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and linked below). These tics vary in frequency, but rarely completely disappear, even with the help of medicine.

Fortunately, Carl Bennett (a pseudonym) is a living example of the stereotypes that an individual with Tourette Syndrome can conquer. Sacks accompanies Bennett as he makes his rounds, performs a surgery that requires precision, drives a car, and  even pilots a plane. He observes how his children and wife help Bennett cope with his Tourettes. He delves into Bennett’s background and describes how Tourettes can often result in periods of hyper focus, a skill that facilitated Bennett’s success in medical school.

In “A Surgeon’s Life,” Sacks paints a picture of a man whose neurological disorder has transformed his life. He refrains from categorizing this transformation as negative or positive but instead lets the facts of Bennett’s life speak for themselves.