Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (London, 1933 - New York, 2015) was a neurologist, writer and popular science author. Born in England, he spent most of his career in the United States, where he became known for books that mixed clinical practice with richly detailed accounts of individual patients. His importance lies in bringing neurological conditions to general readers through the lived experience of those who had them.

He grew up in north London, the youngest of four children in a Jewish family. His father was a doctor and his mother was one of the first female surgeons in England. During the Second World War he was evacuated with his brother Michael to a boarding school in the Midlands, where, by his own later account, the boys went hungry and faced harsh punishments. Back in London he became an enthusiastic amateur chemist. He studied at Oxford, graduated in medicine in 1958, and after some years of practice in Britain travelled to Canada and then the United States, where he trained in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 1966 he began working at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx with survivors of encephalitis lethargica, a illness that had left many of them unable to move on their own for decades. A treatment with L-Dopa briefly restored some of their mobility. That experience led to Awakenings (1973), later adapted into the 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He taught neurology at several New York medical schools and in 2007 was named the first Artist of Columbia University.

His writing started from individual cases, described with close attention to what the patient experienced. He acknowledged a debt to the tradition of clinical case histories and to the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria. In books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, he portrayed people who, despite conditions thought to be incurable, found ways to adapt. For years he contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

His legacy lies in making neurology readable for non-specialists and in giving voice to patients whom medicine often treated as anonymous cases. The New York Times called him a poet laureate of contemporary medicine. After his death, journals and letters were found suggesting that some of his accounts had been embellished or exaggerated, something readers should keep in mind. His last book, Hallucinations (2012), argued that hallucinations are not confined to madness and can occur in people with no mental illness.