The acclaimed author and physician Oliver Sacks has died at the age of 82. He had two careers in his life, one as a caring neurologist and the other as an empathetic writer who described the strange turns that the human brain can take using his patients' disorders as launch pads for discussions of being conscious and being human.
Sacks died of melanoma that had affected on eye several years ago and that had been thought to be successfully treated. But in February, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, Sacks announced that the cancer had metastasized to his liver and that he had only months to live. It was a moving essay, but then, so much of his writing was. He published another essay in the Times just two weeks ago.
Probably his most famous book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, which describes several neurology patients with whom he worked. The man in the title was a doctor who had had a stroke and lost the ability to recognize people and common objects on first glance, resulting in his trying to put his wife's head on his own head. Sack's other books included An Anthropologist on Mars, The Island of the Colorblind, and two memoirs, Uncle Tungsten and On the Move: A Life.
Oliver Sacks was born in England and received a medical degree from Oxford. After medical school, he moved to the United States and worked in San Francisco and New York. In New York in the 1960s, Sacks did clinical work at a hospital in the Bronx where several catatonic patients lived. His work with these patients became the book Awakenings, which was later made into a movie starring Robin Williams and Robert DiNiro.
Over the years, his books and essays have been turned into movies and even an opera.
