BIRTH | 9 July–Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)

9 July 2018–Today would be the 85th birthday of Oxonian writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, best known for his patient-focused explorations of the mysteries of the brain.

Sacks was born in London, youngest of four boys, to parents who were both doctors. When the Luftwaffe started bombing London, his parents sent Oliver and his brother Michael to a rural boarding school in the Midlands. Sacks found the experience horrendous and returned home eventually traumatized. He sought refuge in his basement chemistry lab, studying to become a doctor.

After graduating from Queen's College, Oxford, he emigrated to America for an internship in San Francisco, in the early 1960s. He quickly took to the easygoing culture. He went on a motorcycle trip to the Grand Canyon with the Hell's Angels that he later wrote about in his memoir, On the Move: A Life (2005), in which he also discussed the realization that he was gay.

In 1965, Sacks found work at a hospital in the Bronx. He'd hoped to do medical research, but: "I lost samples. I broke machines. Finally, they said to me, 'Sacks, you're a menace. Get out. Go see patients. They matter less.'" He wrote a book called Ward 23 about his experiences, but disliked it so much he burned it. His first published book was called Migraine (1970). His friend, poet W.H. Auden, counseled him to improve his writing style: "Be metaphorical, be mythical, be whatever you need."

Sacks became fascinated with patients who suffered from sleeping sickness. They were catatonic and had been in the hospital for decades. He began to give them doses of L-dopa, then just beginning to be used for patients suffering from Parkinson's, and the patients responded by emerging from their stupor into a world they didn't recognize, but enjoyed. He wrote about them in Awakenings (1973). The book was a hit and later became a movie starring Robin Williams (1990).

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), Sacks explored the case of a man who suffered from visual agnosia and couldn't recognize his wife. His essay was later adapted into an opera, which premiered in London in 1986. Sacks wrote also about Jimmy G., a submarine operator who suffered from Korsakoff's syndrome and could remember nothing of his life since the end of World War II, even things that had happened a few moments before. He also wrote about Madeleine J., a blind woman who thought her hands were "useless lumps of dough."

Sacks's books were best-sellers, but some critics objected to his use of real case histories. One called Sacks "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career." Sacks said he saw himself as a "naturalist or explorer." Millions of copies of his books are in print and he introduced the general public to Tourette's and Asperger's diseases. He was receiving more than 10,000 letters a year from readers in the early 2010s. He said: "I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90, or in prison."

In 2005 he was diagnosed with ocular cancer. He was treated for ten years (https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2010/09/01/oliver-sacks-on-vision-his-new-book-and-surviving-cancer/) and died in 2015 at 82 years of age.