World-Famous Neurologist Dies
September 2, 2015
Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), a well-known English-born neurologist and author, died last Sunday, August 30, in New York City. (Neurology is the field of medicine concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the brain and nervous system.) Sacks was known for his best-selling books and popular articles, which explored the nature of the mind, consciousness, perception, and thought. His works describe unusual neurological effects in people who have such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, color blindness, epilepsy, Parkinson disease, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome.
Sacks received wide acclaim for his book Awakenings (1973), which recounts his experience in a hospital in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, in 1966. Sacks observed several patients suffering from a movement disorder that left them aware but completely immobile. Sacks gave them a drug called L-dopa, which had recently been developed to treat Parkinson disease, in hopes of restoring movement. Amazingly, some patients regained the ability to move and communicate almost immediately. The effects proved temporary, however, and the patients eventually returned to their immobile state. Awakenings was made into a popular motion picture in 1990. Sacks later wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), which describes the odd effects of brain disorders on memory, perception, speech, and ability in a variety of patients.
Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9, 1933, in London, the capital of the United Kingdom. His parents were both physicians. He studied medicine at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, graduating in 1960. That year, he moved to the United States, where he completed his medical training in San Francisco and Los Angeles, both in California. In 1965, he became a professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College in New York City. Since 1992, he also worked at Columbia University in New York City. In addition, he worked as a consultant in neurological disorders in several New York City hospitals.
His other books include Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), The Island of the Colorblind (1997), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), The Mind’s Eye (2010), and Hallucinations (2012). A memoir of his early life, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, was published in 2001.
Other Links
- Literature (1986-a Back in time article)
- Literature (1989-a Back in time article)
- Oliver Sacks, M.D. (Doctor Sack’s own website)