BIOGRAPHY: Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England to two physician parents, and earned his medical degree at Queen's College, Oxford. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States and completed an internship in San Francisco and a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived and practiced neurology in New York.  Dr. Sacks has published ten books, covering such subjects as migraine headaches, autism and Asperger’s syndrome, savantism, amnesia, phantom limbs, music and the brain, deaf culture and language, Parkinsonism, Tourette's syndrome, and Alzheimer's. He has also written about botany and the history and culture of Oaxaca, and the history of chemistry. On November 26, 2008, Queen Elizabeth II of England awarded Oliver Sacks a C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to medicine.

Themes

Oliver Sacks is concerned with the ways in which individuals survive and adapt to different neurological diseases and conditions; these ailments and experiences can reveal much about the human brain and mind. His books of case histories of neurological patients have been bestsellers around the world and are used widely in universities in courses on neuroscience, writing, ethics, philosophy and sociology. They have served as the inspiration for artists working in forms as varied as poetry, essay, documentary, drama, painting, dance, cinema and fiction. 

Career

In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital, a chronic care facility in the Bronx, where he encountered survivors of the sleeping sickness pandemic (encephalitis lethargica) that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927.  Many of these patients had spent decades in frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement.  Dr. Sacks treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his second book, Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska) and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. 

In 1989, Dr. Sacks received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on what he calls the "neuroanthropology" of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances, and how its symptoms can be perceived differently in different cultures. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals, and he is an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as "the poet laureate of medicine," and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet.

Columbia University

On July 1, 2007, Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger appointed Oliver Sacks to a dual position: Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and Columbia Artist, a new designation.

Further reading

Dr. Sacks’s work is highly personal – even his clinical tales are told from the first person.  In this sense, all of his books may be considered autobiographical.   Dr. Sacks has also written two explicitly autobiographical works, Uncle Tungsten (2001), which narrates the beginnings of his scientific journey, and A Leg to Stand On (1984), which describes his own experiences as a patient. 

More on Oliver Sacks at Columbia University