Sacks

Biography

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England (both of his parents were physicians) 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 in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital, a chronic care facility in the Bronx 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 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 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.

Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his 1985 collection of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's Syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation and Alzheimer's disease. (This book later inspired a dramatic work by Peter Brook, "L'Homme Qui. . . .)

As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the ways in which individuals survive and adapt to different neurological diseases and conditions, and what this experience can tell us about the human brain and mind. His books exploring these themes 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.

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.

His nine books, which also include Migraine (1970), A Leg to Stand On (1984) , Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1990), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), and The Island of the Colorblind (1996), have received numerous awards and have sold several million copies worldwide in 22 languages. His most recent books are Oaxaca Journal (2002) and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001).

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, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Queen's College. 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.

Dr. Sacks has been awarded honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, Tufts University, the College of Staten Island, New York Medical College, the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Bard College, Queen's University (Ontario), and the University of Turin.

Writing

A Leg to Stand On (1984) 

In A Leg To Stand On , it is Dr. Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey, when he finds that his leg uncannily no longer feels a part of his body. Sacks's description of his crisis and eventual recovery is not only an illuminating examination of the experience of patienthood and the inner nature of illness and health, but also a fascinating exploration of the physical basis of identity.

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985)

Here Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders: people afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations; patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do.

Seeing Voices (1989)

With Seeing Voices, Dr. Sacks launches on a journey into the world of the deaf, which he explores with the same passion and insight that have illuminated other human conditions for his readers everywhere.
Seeing Voices begins with the history of deaf people in the United States, the often outrageous ways in which they have been seen and treated in the past, and their continuing struggle for acceptance in a hearing world. And it examines the amazing and beautiful visual language of the deaf--Sign--which has only in the past decade been recognized fully as a language--linguistically complete, rich, and as expressive as any spoken language.
The existence of this unique alternative mode of language, writes Dr. Sacks, has wide-ranging implications for those in the hearing world as well, for it "shows us that much of what is distinctly human in us--our capacities for language, for thought, for communication, and culture--do not develop automatically in us, are not just biological functions, but are, equally, social and historical in origin; that they are a gift--the most wonderful of gifts--from one generation to another....The existence of a visual language, Sign, and of the striking enhancements of perception and visual intelligence that go with its acquisition, shows us that the brain is rich in potentials we would scarcely have guessed of, shows us the almost unlimited resource of the human organism when it is faced with the new and must adapt."
Sign is not only a language but the very medium of deaf culture. It stands at the center of the extraordinary social and political movement for deaf rights, which gained international attention with the uprising of deaf students at Gallaudet University in March 1988. In Part III of Seeing Voices, Dr. Sacks gives an eyewitness account of the revolt, and the students who organized it, and considers its impact on a new generation of deaf children.
Seeing Voices is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, and along the way Oliver Sacks ponders the nature of talking and teaching, child development, the development and functioning of the nervous system, the formation of communities, worlds, and cultures, and the interface of language, biology, and culture.

Awakenings (1973, rev. ed. 1990) 

Awakenings is the remarkable account of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen in a decades-long sleep, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of these individuals, the stories of their lives, and the extraordinary transformations they underwent with treatment. This book, which W. H. Auden called "a masterpiece," is a passionate exploration of the most general questions of health, disease, suffering, care, and the human condition.
The revised 1990 edition includes new essays on the making of several dramatic adaptations of Awakenings , including Harold Pinter's play, "A Kind of Alaska," and the feature film, "Awakenings," starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Migraine (1970, revised edition 1992) 

For centuries, physicians and migraineurs have been fascinated by the many manifestations of migraine, and especially by the visual hallucinations or auras- similar in some ways to those induced by hallucinogenic drugs or deliria--which often precede a migraine. In this revised edition of his first book, Dr. Sacks describes these hallucinatory constants and what they reveal about the working of the brain, drawing on recent advances in chaos theory and neural simulation. Migraine, he writes, can give us a most direct and privileged view not only of the secrets of neuronal organization, but also of the self-organizing systems of nature--recently described by chaos theorists--which often remain hidden in our daily lives.
Beyond this, Dr. Sacks finds a fascination in the multiple forms of migraine and the many triggers which may set them off--and of the crucial importance of considering the role played by migraine in each individual's life.

An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks has written, are travellers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travellers-- including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's Syndrome except when he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who has great difficulty deciphering the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.
These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that--however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking--may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Dr. Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far borders of experience.
Along the way, he gives us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted--the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color--Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.

The Island of the Colorblind (1997)

An exploration of a society where total congenital colorblindness is the norm, this book is also a meditation on islands and the strange neurologic malady on Guam which resembles parkinsonism and Alzheimer’s, and may provide the key to these diseases.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

The "Uncle Tungsten" of the book's title is Sacks's Uncle Dave, who manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire, and who first initiated Sacks into the mysteries of metals. The author of this illuminating and poignant memoir describes his four tortuous years at boarding school during the war, where he was sent to escape the bombings, and his profound inquisitiveness cultivated by living in a household steeped in learning, religion and politics (both his parents were doctors and his aunts were ardent Zionists). But as Sacks writes, the family influence extended well beyond the home, to include the groundbreaking chemists and physicists whom he describes as "honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection." Family life exacted another transformative influence as well: his older brother Michael's psychosis made him feel that "a magical and malignant world was closing in about him," perhaps giving a hint of what led the author to explore the depths of psychosis in his later professional life. For Sacks, the onset of puberty coincided with his discovery of biology, his departure from his childhood love of chemistry and, at age 14, a new understanding that he would become a doctor. Many readers and patients are happy with that decision.

Oaxaca Journal (2002)

A trip to see ferns in Mexico turns into a meditation on Mesoamerican civilization,chocolate, agriculture, mescal, amateur naturalists and more.

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