An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Chris Marris is the special education teacher and mentor to Stephen Wiltshire in “Prodigies.” Marris takes a keen interest in Stephen, encouraging him to continue drawing and sharing his work while also incorporating lessons in language into his artwork in the hopes he will eventually become more verbal. Sacks eventually comes to believe that Marris’s diminished presence in Stephen’s life after taking another job causes Stephen pain; he thus indirectly serves as a window into the emotional life of someone with classical autism.

Magnani is an Italian artist and immigrant living in San Francisco, as detailed in “The Landscape of His Dreams.” Magnani is obsessed with painting and talking about his home village of Pontito in Italy, creating artwork out of his near-photographic recollection of the town before World War II. Sacks is interested in his memories and dreams of this village, and he documents how returning to Pontito challenged and inspired Magnani’s artwork to evolve and change. His story offers insights into the nature of memory and nostalgia in human experience.

Greg F. is a young man who developed a brain tumor while living in isolation with the Hare Krishnas in late 1960s New Orleans; though benign, the tumor caused enough damage that Greg lost his vision, his short-term memory, and the function of his pituitary gland. His fellow Hare Krishnas mistake his condition for enlightenment—itself a statement on the complex interplay between neurology and identity—leaving the tumor untreated. Sacks meets him while working at Williamsbridge, where Greg lives permanently. Despite Sacks’s many attempts to reach him and help him make new memories, Greg is unable to permanently acquire any new recollections. He is the subject of the essay “The Last Hippie.”

Jonathan is an artist in his sixties who suffers from achromatopsia after an accident described in the essay “The Color-Blind Artist.” Sacks and Wasserman examine him to investigate why he lost his ability to see color and if his condition can be reversed. While they are ultimately unable to do so, Jonathan I. eventually begins to create art that speaks to the white, black, and gray way he now views the world.

Margaret Hewson is the literary agent and mentor to Stephen Wiltshire in “Prodigies.” She discovers his artistic talent early on when she sees his artwork in a children’s art exhibit. Sacks travels with Stephen and Hewson to various cities to find new inspiration for his work.

Oliver Sacks, M.D., is the bestselling, critically-acclaimed author and narrator of An Anthropologist on Mars. Throughout the book, he utilizes his professional experience as a neurologist to explain, contextualize, and analyze the seven people whose cases he follows. Sacks’s desire is to approach these patients as a “neuroanthropologist,” focusing on how these patients adapted to their neurological conditions and on how these conditions provide a lens into their identity and self-perception. His first-person narration appears sparingly throughout the book, and he only inserts himself when he must add firsthand observations or his own subjective understanding of what he’s describing.

Robert Wasserman is an ophthalmologist who travels with Sacks and provides eye exams and consultations in both “The Color-Blind Artist” and “To See and Not See.” While he is not a major character on the page, he is a close collaborator with Sacks as they interrogate the diagnoses of their patients.

Stephen Wiltshire is a British autistic savant whose drawings of buildings and architectural wonders gain national attention. Sacks writes about him in his essay “Prodigies” while also considering the broader relationship of the “idiot savant” category to memory, identity, and autism. Stephen is 13 years old when his first book of artwork is published. Sacks visits with and tests him over the course of his adolescence, making note of his limited verbal skills as well as his developing understanding of his art and the people around him.

Temple Grandin is an acclaimed autistic author and animal scientist as described in the essay “An Anthropologist on Mars.” Grandin is one of the few writers to have spoken firsthand about what it is like to live with Asperger’s syndrome. She feels a particular tenderness and connection to cows and other farm animals, which led her to her work designing and engineering humane farm buildings and slaughterhouses. Grandin is unable to feel the same connection to fellow human beings, leaving her to feel left out and at a remove, much like Sacks does when encountering the patients throughout the book.