FINANCIAL TIMES

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and writer, 1933-2015

Popular books illustrated the workings of the human mind through vivid case studies

August 30, 2015

by: Clive Cookson

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Oliver Sacks, who has died in New York aged 82, became the world’s best-known neurologist through popular books published over more than 40 years, illustrating the workings of the human mind through vivid case studies.
In works such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and The Mind’s Eye (2010) Sacks described case histories from the borderlands of neurological experience, showing what scientists could learn from patients. The struggles of people living with illusions and hallucinations, autism and dementia, schizophrenia and epilepsy were all treated with warmth.
From individual cases of neural abnormality he drew brilliant lessons about the workings of brains in general. In the last years of his life Sacks wrote movingly about his own battle with cancer and partial blindness. He died at home on Sunday after saying in February the disease had spread from a tumour on the eye.
Although Sacks stood out as a writer and populariser, he also made notable contributions to research as a professor of neurology successively at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Columbia University and New York University. He was an expert on phantom limb pain, the effect of music on the brain, epilepsy and colour vision — among a wide range of academic interests.
Sacks was born on July 9 1933 into a medical and scientific family in the Orthodox Jewish community of Cricklewood, north-west London. His early years feature in the autobiographical book Uncle Tungsten (2001).
He studied medicine at Oxford university and Middlesex Hospital in London. As soon as he qualified as a doctor in 1960, Sacks moved to the US, where he was to spend the rest of his life. After five years in California at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital and the University of California, Los Angeles, he took up a fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
Sacks was captivated by New York City life and by the study of neurology. In 1966 he started working at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in frozen states, like statues, unable to initiate movement.
He recognised them as survivors from the “sleepy sickness” pandemic of the early 20th century and treated them with L-dopa, then an experimental drug, which brought some patients back to life — at least for a while. They became the subjects of his 1973 book Awakenings, which inspired a play by Harold Pinter and an acclaimed feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Although he wrote extensively about his own experiences, Sacks remained remarkably reticent about his personal life until this year. Then, with the author terminally ill, some of the secrets came out. In his final autobiography, On the Move, and searing articles in The New York Times, Sacks confirmed what many readers had suspected: he was gay.
As a teenager he confessed his homosexuality to his father, who then told his mother, despite being asked not to. Sacks saw her harsh reaction — “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born” — as being rooted in Judaism and made him “hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty”.
For 35 years of his adult life Sacks was celibate. As he himself recognised, an emotional involvement with his patients was something of a substitute for personal romance: “I had fallen in love — and out of love — and in a sense was in love with my patients.”
But in 2008 romantic life resumed. The writer Billy Hayes became his partner and survives him.
Clive Cookson