Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (born July 9, 1933, London, England—died August 30, 2015, New York, New York, U.S.) British neurologist and writer who won acclaim for his sympathetic case histories of patients with unusual neurological disorders.

Sacks spent most of his childhood in London, though his parents (his father was a general practitioner and his mother a surgeon) sent him to a boarding school for four years during World War II to escape the air raids then strafing the city. Sacks attended Queen’s College, Oxford, where he received a bachelor’s degree in physiology in 1954 and a medical degree in 1958. He completed an internship at Middlesex Hospital in London in 1959 and served as house surgeon of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in 1960. Sacks left England for the United States to accept an internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco (1961–62) before serving as a resident in neurology (1962–65) at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1965 Sacks became an instructor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx borough of New York City, eventually becoming a clinical professor of neurology (1966–75). He also joined Beth Abraham Hospital, a charity institution in the Bronx, as a staff neurologist (1966–2007). There he met a group of patients who had contracted a sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, during an epidemic that broke out between 1917 and 1927. The patients had survived only to develop a type of parkinsonism that caused varying degrees of immobility, speechlessness, and depression. Sacks recounted the brief cure that the patients experienced after receiving the drug l-dopa and the drug’s subsequent side effects in his 1973 book Awakenings, which was made into a motion picture (1990) starring Robin Williams as the doctor.

Sacks enumerated further experiences, both professional and personal, in a series of volumes written for a popular audience. Having injured a leg in a mountaineering accident, he learned firsthand how a physician’s dismissal of a patient’s condition could hinder recuperation, a saga he related in A Leg to Stand On (1984). Sacks took care to illuminate the existential as well as pathological conditions of his patients in works such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1985). While most critics found his descriptions of the often strange afflictions to be humane and sympathetic, some accused Sacks of merely attempting to excite and amuse his audience.

Sacks continued to record the extraordinary circumstances of the patients he encountered and the equally remarkable adaptations that they developed. In Seeing Voices (1989), he explored the ways in which sign language not only provides the deaf with a means of communication but also serves as the foundation for a discrete culture. In An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), he documented the lives of seven patients living with conditions ranging from autism to brain damage and described the unique ways in which they created functional lives in spite of their disabilities. Sacks described his journey to Micronesia to study a population with a high incidence of colour blindness and to Guam to study a mysterious form of paralysis in The Island of the Colorblind (1997). He presented further case studies in The Mind Traveler (1998), a program produced for television, and wrote of patients with conditions relating to music in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). The Mind’s Eye (2010) investigated the compensatory mechanisms employed by people with sensory disorders, including himself (in the wake of vision loss in one eye as a result of ocular melanoma). Hallucinations (2012) inventoried conditions and circumstances—from epilepsy to drug use to sensory deprivation—that can cause hallucinations and chronicled the effects of illusory neurological phenomena on those who experienced them. Among his autobiographical works were Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001), Oaxaca Journal (2002), and On the Move (2015).

In 1989 Sacks received a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of the influence of culture on the aberrant neurological processes underlying the rare inherited disease known as Tourette syndrome. In addition to his position at Beth Abraham, he served as professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine (1992–2007; 2012–15) and as a consulting neurologist at the university’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center (1999–2007). He was also a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City (2007–12). He was appointed Columbia University Artist, a position created for him to ensure that Columbia students from all disciplines would benefit from his association with the university. Sacks was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2008.

Though Sacks resided permanently in the United States, he never relinquished British citizenship. In February 2015 he announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The ocular melanoma for which he had previously been treated spread to his liver, and he ultimately succumbed to the illness. The River of Consciousness (2017), a collection of essays, was published posthumously. The documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life appeared in 2019.