Oliver Sacks 1933-2015

Remember Oliver Sacks, who died last night.

Henry Bemis Books published this short profile for his last birthday, in July:

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE (1933-  )

Neurologist, Author

Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1996

Honorary Fellow, The Queen’s College, Oxford, 1999

Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2002

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2008

Born in London, evacuated to a Dickensian school during The Blitz, Sacks took three degrees at Oxford before moving to Canada (he sent his parents a postcard bearing the word “Staying”), then made his way to San Francisco for post-doctoral work and a thorough grounding in sex, drugs and rock and roll in the early 1960s. He took up bodybuilding, motorcycles and various recreational drugs, then moved to New York City in 1965 to pursue  a career in clinical neurology.

Stumbling across a ward of patients afflicted by a zombie-like sleeping sickness, Sacks realized some remarkable, if transient, results, with drug therapy, and turned his experience into a best-selling book and film, Awakenings. Most of his dozen later books have dealt with the lives and experiences of people afflicted by odd and rare neurological malfunctions.

While his books made Sacks famous, they have consistently attracted criticism from the medical community for popularizing difficult medical and ethical issues, and by disability activists for trading in freakery. One British disability campaigner, Tom Shakespeare, parodied a Sacks bestseller by denouncing him as “The man who mistook his patients for a literary career.” The actor Bill Murray parodied Sacks in the Wes Anderson film, The Royal Tenenbaums.

Famously reticent, Sacks revealed his struggles with shyness, which complicated his developing long-term relationships as a gay man, in his 2015 autobiography. He also revealed that, after decades of various eye problems, he has developed a fatal, ocular form of cancer that bids fair to make this, his 82nd birthday, his last. In articles and interviews, however, he has maintained he is pressing ahead on his next book.

Related sites:

Oliver Sacks.com (Official author site)