> Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.”

and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this.

The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.

> The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.

TLDR

> after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.

AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title.

From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.