Oliver (Wolf) Sacks - Biography, Books, Essays

Neurologist and writer, born in London, UK. Educated at Oxford, he went to the USA in 1960, and after completing advanced studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (1960–5), he joined the neurology faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY) (1965), and also became a consultant neurologist at various New York hospitals. Even in his first book, Migraine: Evolution of a Common Disorder (1970; expanded edn 1985), he was laying forth his unorthodox approach of stressing links between mental and emotional states and physical and bodily afflictions, essentially a holistic approach. Meanwhile, in the late 1960s he had worked in a New York hospital, where he encountered some 80 people suffering from a ‘sleeping sickness’ that had spread around the world c.1916–20. He experimented by giving some of them the drug L-DOPA and obtained what at first seemed to be amazing results (for after ‘awakening’, most soon regressed); he described this experience in Awakenings (1973), a book that inspired the Harold Pinter play, A Kind of Alaska, and the film Awakenings (1992). Controversial in his profession for some of his theories, he also published articles on his ‘cases’ in non-professional magazines, then collected them in such books as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1985). His book, A Leg to Stand On (1984), went even further in his tendency to link the professional and personal, basing his findings on an accident that temporarily cost him the use of a leg, and thereby promoting his notion of the unity of the complex interactions of body, mind, and behaviour.

Oliver Wolf Sacks (born July 9, 1933, London) is a neurologist who has written popular books about his patients.

Biography

Sacks earned his medical degrees from Oxford University while a member of The Queen's College and became a resident in neurology at UCLA. He is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Sacks describes his cases with little clinical detail, concentrating on the experiences of the patient (which was in one case himself).

His most famous book, Awakenings, upon which the movie of the same name is based, describes his experiences using the new drug L-Dopa on patients who were victims of the 1920s sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica) epidemic.

In his other books, he describes cases of Tourette syndrome and various effects of Parkinson's disease.

Sacks's writings have been translated into 21 languages, including Catalan, Finnish, and Turkish.

In March 2006, he was one of 263 doctors who published an open letter in The Lancet criticizing American military doctors who administered or oversaw the force-feeding of Guantanamo detainees who had committed themselves to hunger strikes.

Books

Migraine (1970) Awakenings (1973) A Leg to Stand On (1984) (Sacks's own experience of losing the control of his legs after an accident) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) Seeing Voices: A Journey Into The Land of the Deaf. An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) The Island of the Colorblind (1997) (total congenital color blindness in an island society) Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) Oaxaca Journal (2002)

Essays

"The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)" (positive experiences of blind people) - published in "The Best American Essays 2004", Ed.