Author shone light on mental illness
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.
Sacks had announced in February 2015 that he was terminally ill with a rare eye cancer that had spread to his liver.
As a practising neurologist, Sacks looked at some of his patients with a writer’s eye and found publishing gold.
In his bestselling 1985 book, he 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. Discover magazine ranked it among the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006, declaring: “Legions of neuroscientists now probing the mysteries of the human brain cite this book as their greatest inspiration.”
Sacks’s 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.
Other books included 2007’s book, Musicophilia, which looked at the relationship between music and the brain, including its healing effect on people suffering from such diseases as Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Sacks was born in 1933 in London, son of husband-andwife physicians. Both were skilled at recounting medical stories, and Sack’s own writing impulse “seems to have come directly from them,” he said in his 2015 memoir, On the Move.
After earning a medical degree at Oxford, Sacks moved to the United States in 1960. He moved to New York in 1965 and began decades of neurology practice. At a Bronx hospital he met the profoundly disabled patients he described in Awakenings.
He was once asked what he’d learned from peering into lives much different from the norm.
“People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colourblind or autistic or whatever,” he replied. “And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.”