Respectfully, I'm not sure you can draw meaningful conclusions about a 100+ paragraph deep-dive article after reading the first eight or nine. The biography stuff is definitely relevant to the takeaways about Sacks' methodology and style:

> Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.”

[...]

> Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze.

[...]

> “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?”

> “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds.

> “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”