Chronicler of unusual neurology cases

NEW YORK — Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat probed distant ranges of human experience by compassionately portraying people with severe and sometimes bizarre neurological conditions, has died. He was 82.

Sacks died Sunday at his home in New York City, his assistant, Kate Edgar, said.

Sacks had announced in February that he was terminally ill with a rare eye cancer that had spread to his liver.

In his best- selling 1985 book, Sacks, who was a practicing neurologist, described a man who really did mistake his wife’s face for his hat while visiting Sacks’ office, because his brain had difficulty interpreting what he saw. Another story in the book featured autistic twins who had trouble with ordinary math but who could perform other amazing calculations.

Sacks’ 1973 book, Awakenings, about hospital patients who’d spent decades in a kind of frozen state until Sacks tried a new treatment, led to a 1990 movie in which Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams. It was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in 1933 in London; both of his parents were physicians.

After earning a medical degree at the University of Oxford, Sacks moved to the United States in 1960 and completed a medical internship in San Francisco and a neurology residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He moved to New York in 1965 and began decades of neurology practice.

Among his other books were The Island of the Colorblind ( 1997), An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales ( 1995), Seeing Voices ( 1989) and Hallucinations ( 2012), in which Sacks discussed his own hallucinations as well as those of some patients.