OBITUARIES

Oliver Sacks; PJ Kavanagh

THE NEUROLOGIST and writer Oliver Sacks died in New York at the age of 82. As befits the life of such a prodigious polymath, the obituaries celebrated Sacks’s remarkable spirit of scientific and human curiosity. The New York

Times hailed his ability to look beyond the mere medical symptoms of his patients. ‘The animating theme of Sacks’s work is the importance of individuality in medicine. He quoted Sir William Osler with approval — “Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has” — and wrote in Awakenings: “There is nothing alive which is not individual: our health is ours; our diseases are ours; our reactions are ours — no less than our minds or our faces.” ’

Sacks was born in north London in 1933, to a general practitioner father Samuel, and a mother Muriel, who was a surgeon and pathologist. ‘His future interests and talents were shaped and nurtured by his large, rumbustious, cultivated, polymathic Jewish family,’ wrote the New York Times. After studying medicine at The Queen’s College, Oxford, Sacks moved to the United States — where he was to live for the rest of his life — and became Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine, then Professor of Neurology and Psychia- try at Columbia. His many bestselling books, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, showed his interest in using case studies of neurological disorders to illuminate wider questions about the human condition. The Economist obituarist wrote that Sacks’s obsession was to ‘climb inside the brains of his patients’. Adam Zeman in the Guardian described his work as ‘absorbing and accessible yet profound’.

The Economist obituary noted that Sacks, who found romantic love only in his late seventies, often wrote ‘late into the night, monkish in his solitude’. From his home in the Bronx, he took a daily swim in Long Island Sound up until the last months of his life. The

Economist concluded: ‘Some medical peers thought his work overdramatic, even exploitative; his books had at first been ignored in America. He regretted this not just for selfish reasons, but because his wider agenda was to bring back from the strangest frontiers of individual struggling and experience some further indications, some extraordinary hints, of the immense mystery of what it means to be human.’