The brains behind Brilliant Minds, plus 5 more medical mavericks

Neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks first electrified the public in 1973 when he published Awakenings, his account of how the “miracle” drug L-Dopa revived patients in his care who’d been in an unresponsive state ever since the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the 1920s. The book was adapted into a play, two films, a ballet and an opera. And Robert De Niro and Robin Williams earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for their performances in the 1990 film adaptation.

By the time of his death from cancer in 2015, Oliver Sacks had published multiple bestselling books based on the extraordinary patients he’d helped over the course of his career, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), both of which were used as the blueprint for the new medical drama series, Brilliant Minds.

A series based on Oliver Sacks’ life has been in negotiation ever since his death 10 years ago. But Oliver’s longtime editor Kate Edgar, his life-partner Bill Hayes, and the Oliver Sacks Foundation weren’t happy with any of the pitches until series creator Michael Grassi’s version, Brilliant Minds, came their way. They quickly spotted that  Michael had understood the key to Oliver Sacks work – by having in-depth relationships with the people he treated, Oliver was able to help them to adapt in ways that worked for their lives. The long-term relationships also made it possible for him to delve into fascinating detail when he told their stories in his books. 

"What Oliver Sacks did so well, is that he told incredible stories about people," Michael Grassi told NBC Insider. "That's the same thing we're doing on our show as patients come in and they're suffering from these strange, mysterious illnesses. It's about our doctors getting to know them. It's not just about the condition, it's about the person." 

Binge Brilliant Minds now, and scroll down for five more series about dedicated doctors playing detective.

Oliver and Oliver

Zarchary Quinto’s (Star Trek: Beyond) character, Dr Oliver Wolf, shares more than a first name with Dr Sacks, and comes close to his true character without being a literal portrait. Since Dr Sacks left behind a treasure trove of work, including books, articles, interviews, lectures and TED Talks – all curated by and accessible through the Oliver Sacks Foundation – Zachary and Brilliant Minds’ writers never had to scrabble for inspiration. 

One of the key things they have in common, aside from their dedication to their patients, is an unusual medical condition: prosopagnosia, nicknamed face blindness. Like Dr Sacks, Dr Wolf struggles to recognise people based on their facial features – including loved ones and even himself. He also struggles to connect facial cues to people’s emotional states. In real life, Dr Sacks learned other ways to identify people, like the size of their hands, what they typically wore, or how they walked.

Brilliant Minds explores how the disorder affects Dr Wolf’s relationship with his colleagues, who interpret his reactions to them as snobbish, since (as we see in episode 2) he frequently acts as if he doesn’t know them. One colleague who broke through in real life was Dr Sacks’ friend and colleague, Dr Carol E Burnett – the inspiration behind Brilliant Minds’ Dr Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry). She was the first Black graduate (and one of the first women graduates) from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in 1960. The two did their residency together and supported one another as Dr Burnett advocated for diversity in the medical field and spotlighted how race and gender impacted patient care.

Like Dr Sacks, Dr Wolf is able to use his condition as a starting point for connecting with patients. In episode 1, he teaches hacks for recognising people to a young mom who no longer recognises her own children following brain surgery. She has Capgras Syndrome, a delusion in which patients believe that close friends and family have been replaced by imposters. When Dr Wolf realises that she still recognises and responds emotionally to her children’s voices, he is able to work on a way forward with her.

Dr Wolf also shares other facets of Dr Sacks’ personal life, from being gay, to his insistence on a daily morning swim in the Hudson River, to his love of ferns, which his friends and colleagues remember him carrying around with him as if they were his babies. And Dr Wolf’s refusal to have a cellphone ties in to Dr Sacks’ refusal to use a computer. He typed out his books and case notes on an old fashioned typewriter, despite being a two-finger typist!

Same case, different time

Like Dr Sacks, Dr Wolf’s relationship with his patients doesn’t follow the usual case-diagnosis-cure pattern. For many of his patients with neurological disorders, there isn’t really a cure, just ways of adapting. So Dr Wolf plays the long game with patients like John Doe (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), an anonymous man who wakes up with Locked In Syndrome, and paramedic Katie Rodriguez (Mishel Prada), who suffers from chronic pain. But while using Dr Sacks’ cases as outlines for stories, Brilliant Minds updates and changes details to reflect updates to technology and patient care over the past 40 years. 

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Dr Sacks describes a brilliant painter who developed cerebral achromatopsia – an inability to see colour – following a car accident. Unlike Dr Sacks, D. Wolf tries treating his patient, Gabriel Ferguson (Robert Ray Manning Jr), with psilocybin, a hallucinogen, to see whether he can access and learn to use his memories of colour. The alternative treatment is based on modern research into psilocybin therapy and the drug’s decriminalisation in parts of the US (although, as the characters point out, it is still illegal in New York). Dr Wolf and his team are able to use brain imaging as a diagnostic tool, which wasn’t available to Dr Sacks back in the 1980s.

Meanwhile episode 2, titled  "The Disembodied Woman" – based on a case from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – highlights some ways that patient care protocols have changed since Dr Sacks was working. 

Dr Wolf’s patient, basketball coach Jessie Williams (Nedra Marie Taylor), is rapidly losing her sense of proprioception – her connection to knowing, intuitively, how to move her body, and where it is in space. At first her surgeon dismisses her concerns about losing feeling as “hysteria” and requests a psych evaluation, which will have many women in the audience grinding their teeth with rage. Fortunately, Dr Wolf is just as horrified that someone would use the term hysterical to dismiss what a female patient tells them. He settles in to really listen and he and his team set out to thoroughly check for an underlying physical cause when they notice that even her handwriting has deteriorated since she was admitted. And aside from spotlighting medicine’s continuing shortfalls in treating women, the episode highlights recent advances in respecting patients’ bodily autonomy and requiring informed consent for medical procedures.

So if you could use some entertainment TLC with a gentle touch, fill your prescription with a Brilliant Minds binge now!

Also watch: 5 doctor detectives

Love Brilliant Minds? Try these five series with dedicated doctors solving medical mysteries. 

1. House

In this darkly funny medical dramedy series, antisocial Dr Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) treats his colleagues like incompetent detectives and patients like puzzles. This series is the ultimate binge for medical mystery fans as Dr House was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, while his best friend, Dr Watson (Robert Sean Leonard) was even named after Sherlock’s sidekick. House Season 1, episode 8, features a patient, Georgia, who was based on one of Dr Sacks’ case studies, detailed in the Cupid’s Disease chapter of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Binge House Season 1-8 now.

2. Transplant

Hamza Haq plays Bashir “Bash” Hamed, a battlefield trauma surgeon who must redo his medical training in order to practice at York Memorial Hospital after arriving in Canada as a refugee from the Syrian Civil War. While the series’ main focus is emergency medicine, it’s often Bash’s sensitive, patient-centered practice and willingness to listen that helps him to spot the tiny clues that save lives. 

Binge Transplant Season 1-4 now.

3. New Amsterdam

Based on the memoir Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Dr Eric Manheimer, New Amsterdam follows Dr Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold), a new medical director who breaks rules in order to fix the health system at America’s oldest public hospital. For both Dr Goodwin and his colleagues, the key to the case is often not just in examining the patient’s body, but playing detective in their environment – whether they’ve been taking a holiday on melting ice caps, or have been inmates at a prison where a guard has been illegally drugging inmates to keep them calm. 

Binge New Amsterdam Season 1-5  now.

4. The Knick

It’s early in the 20th Century – a lawless time in medicine – and New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital is fighting to keep its lights on by offering groundbreaking medical procedures performed by Dr John Thackery (Clive Owen). This head surgeon with a cocaine and opium addiction was loosely inspired real-life surgeon William Stewart Halsted (the namesake of  Chicago Med’s Dr Will Halstead). Like Dr Wolf, Dr Thackery is a pioneer in his field who often has to adapt treatments for his patients’ (and the hospital’s) circumstances on the fly.

Binge The Knick Season 1-2 now.

5. In Treatment

 This HBO drama series takes us inside sessions with therapists Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne, in Seasons 1-3) and Dr Brooke Taylor (Uzo Aduba, Season 4). As they treat their patients, they often find themselves wrestling with ethical dilemmas and their own issues. Rather than taking a case-of-the-week format, the series digs into how therapists deal with long-running relationships with patients. Treatment doesn’t always lead to progress and some issues prove resistant to change. The work takes a tricky balance between persistence and innovation, so if you’re looking for a medical series with no simple solutions, this is it!

Binge In Treatment Season 1-4 now.