British neurologist and popular author Oliver Sacks died today at age 82 in his New York City home. Sacks was a Professor of Neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a beloved writer whose works included collections of case studies on neurological disorders, spanning from the neuroscience of face blindness and catatonia to that of music and love.
WHAT DID OLIVER SACKS DO?
Sacks frequently incorporated musings on his own maladies into his books, such as in Migraine, The Mind’s Eye, and Hallucinations, which considered his experiences with LSD and mescaline. Sacks was a longtime contributor to NPR, often regaling audiences with personal as well as professional tales from his life. Sacks’s memoir, On the Move: A Life was released in May 2015.
A FEW MORE GOOD BOOKS
Sacks’s best known works also include the bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings. The latter, his 1973 memoir on a work with patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.
Sacks announced in February 2015 that he had terminal liver cancer.
LITERARY EXCELLENCE
In his writings, Sacks did not reduce people to scientific curiosities or otherwise surface-level sources of alienation, but instead as individuals capable of gaining our empathy as much as those written by Chekov (who, coincidentally, was also a doctor with great artistic vision and insight). Sacks was always concerned with how patients’ lives suffered from neurological disorders; how they had to adapt their relationships, personal lives, even simple daily routines to their developing disorders.
Instead of simply depicting his characters as victims or hapless fellows of the world, he transformed his case studies into literary narratives that were fully dramatic , detailed and aware of their readers’ thoughts. These stories did not marginalize such characters, but to the contrary placed them in an active world of flux and thriving change.
THE HUMAN CONDITION
His ability to reproduce the physiological, emotional aspects of characters juxtaposed to metaphysical desire and speculation was uncanny. Readers learn the great costs of the extreme alienation that comes with the sort of isolation such patients endured. He always made sure that there was an element of resilience and autonomy to these characters, for none of them–or their corresponding real-life patients–lived without retaining a sense of identity and personal agency.
Indeed, some who’ve suffered neurological disorders have used it as inspiration to accomplish great things.
