Biography 2008 Oliver Sacks, M.D

Biography 2008 Oliver Sacks, M.D., F.R.C.P., C.B.E. Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England, into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner). He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen’s College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist. In July of 2007, he was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the first Columbia University Artist. In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of encephalitis lethargica, the "sleepy sickness" that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (“A Kind of Alaska”) and the Oscar-nominated feature film (“Awakenings”) with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and he is best known for his compassionate explorations of the far borderlands of neurological experience, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of totally colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Sacks's books and essays have been translated into dozens of languages, and they have inspired specialists in medicine, philosophy, ethics, neuroscience, anthropology, physical therapy, psychology—and the general public. He has deeply influenced our understanding of human illness and the ways in which we adapt to illness as patients, the ways we care for those who are neurologically challenged, and the fundamental ways in which illness affects our identity as individuals or communities. Sacks's work has not only inspired countless young people to embark on careers in medicine and health care; it has inspired and fertilized the work of a wide array of scientists working in subjects ranging from the mechanics of visual and auditory perception to the workings of memory and consciousness itself. His work has also permeated the culture at large, so that people now speak of “Oliver Sacks-like conditions” when they mean something odd and interesting that requires our compassion and understanding—or that sheds light on the ways in which the human brain functions and adapts and shapes our world. Even people who have not read any of his books are likely to have heard of his ideas—either on the radio, television, or internet, or in one of the many artistic adaptations that have been made of his work. Some of our leading artists and writers, including Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, and Brian Friel, have been inspired to adapt Sacks’s work; others, like Jonathan Lethem and Umberto Eco, have been deeply influenced by it. Hollywood has made two films based on Sacks’s narratives, and television now features “Sacksian” cases almost daily. His work has also inspired poets (Thom Gunn and W. H. Auden both dedicated poems to him), visual artists, dancers, and composers. Publishers now routinely publish not only scholarly works about, but the memoirs of people who are living with, many neurological conditions: savant syndrome, autism, blindness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, schizophrenia, strokes, and even dementia—a cultural sea change that has been strongly influenced by the works of Oliver Sacks. Sacks’s work (which he sometimes refers to as neuro-anthropology) has been supported by the Guggenheim and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as in various medical journals. He has received a George S. Polk Award for reporting, and the Lewis Thomas Prize from Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from a number of universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, the Catholic University of P_ru, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Sacks is also known for his omnivorous sense of curiosity and wonder, and his many non-neurological enthusiasms, including elements (particularly heavy metals), ferns (which he wrote about in Oaxaca Journal) and cycads (which he wrote about in The Island of the Colorblind); cephalopods (particularly cuttlefish); swimming; sushi; Mozart, Bach, and Darwin. He is currently working on a book about vision and the brain. For more information, please visit www.oliversacks.com.

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