Oliver Saks

Oliver Wolf Sacks was a renowned American neurologist and neuropsychologist of British origin, a writer, and a popularizer of medicine. He was the author of a number of popular books describing the clinical histories of his patients. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Sacks was a continuation of the 19th-century tradition of “clinical tales.” His works are not rich in medical detail; rather, he places emphasis on the personal experiences of his patients. He also showed that some patients who were “abnormal” in one area were sometimes able to find themselves in another, although their pathology remained incurable.

Oliver Sacks was born into a family of doctors and scientists, and received his medical education at Oxford University. From 1965 he lived in New York and practiced medicine. In July 2007 he was appointed professor in the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. In 1966 he began working as a neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx.

There Oliver Sacks encountered an unusual group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in a completely immobile state. He managed to get these patients back on their feet thanks to the experimental drug L-dopa, and as a result they became the heroes of his book Awakenings. Dr. Sacks also explored the world of deaf people and sign language, which was reflected in his book A Leg to Stand On. Well known are his works The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients trying to live with such conditions as autism spectrum disorders, parkinsonism, epilepsy, and schizophrenia. One of Oliver Sacks’s later works is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Sacks corresponded with the Soviet neuropsychologist A. R. Luria and often referred to his works. In March 2006 he was one of 263 physicians who signed a protest letter against the use of torture by American military doctors on prisoners in Guantánamo.

The autobiographical work Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001. On February