Oliver Sacks

The English physician and writer Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, the son of a couple of physicists. He graduated in medicine from Oxford and in the early 1960s moved to the United States. There he studied as an intern in San Francisco and later pursued neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1965 he moved to New York, where he became a professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, an assistant professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, and a neurology consultant at a charitable institution.

In 1966, he also began working as a neurologist at Berth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York. There he dealt with a group of patients characterized by decades of catatonic inactivity, unable to make any kind of movement. He found that these patients were survivors of a major sleeping sickness epidemic that swept the world between 1916 and 1927. He then treated them with a new drug, L-dopa, which allowed them to return to a normal life. This case inspired him to write the book in 1973. Awakenings, his second literary work, which would serve as inspiration for Harold Pinter to write the play A Type from Alaska and to director Penny Marshall for making the film Awakenings. That film, released in 1990, starred Robin Williams as Sacks and Robert De Niro.

But even before this film was released, Sacks had become known, especially in the United States of America, with the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). This work, published in 1985, was a collection of true case stories on the fringes of neurological experience. It recounted the struggles of patients with schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Tourette syndrome, autism, etc.

In 1989, Oliver Sacks was honored by the Guggenheim Foundation for his work in what he called the neuroanthropology of Tourette Syndrome, in which patients have involuntary tics. The study analyzes, in particular, how the condition was perceived in different cultures.
His books, written since 1970 and translated into more than twenty languages, have become bestsellers and won numerous awards around the world, being used in university classes. They have also inspired artists from various cultural fields. But Sacks also became known for his writings in the press, both general and specialized in medicine.

Oliver Sacks is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Oliver Sacks died in New York on August 30, 2015.