Biography

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As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the links between body and mind, and the ways in which the whole person adapts to different neurological conditions.

 

Born in 1933 in London (where both of his parents were physicians), Dr. Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from Oxford University. In 1961, he moved to the United States, where he did an internship at Mount Zion Hospital (UCSF) in San Francisco and then a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a clinical professor of neurology at both the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the NYU Medical School, and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor. In July of 2007, he was appointed a Professor of Clinical Neurology and Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was designated Columbia University's first Columbia Artist.

 

In 1966 Dr. Sacks went to work at Beth Abraham, a chronic hospital in the Bronx, where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, unable to initiate movement, like human statues — they were survivors of the great epidemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world in the 1920s. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired both a play by Harold Pinter, A Kind of Alaska, and the Oscar-nominated 1990 Hollywood movie Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

 

Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his collection of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, a book that is widely used in colleges and high schools around the world, and has inspired many young doctors to enter the field of neurology.  

 

His books, which also include Migraine; A Leg To Stand On; Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf; An Anthropologist On Mars; Oaxaca Journal, The Island Of The Colorblind, and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, are international bestsellers in over two dozen languages. He is also the author of a memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, in which he looks back on his childhood in wartime London, revealing his boyhood love of chemistry as the source of his lifelong scientific curiosity. His latest book, The Mind's Eye, will be published by Knopf in October 2010.

 

Dr. Sacks's articles appear regularly in 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, and the New York Academy of Sciences.

 

His work has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writings on the neuro-anthropology of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances, and a grant. In 2008 Queen Elizabeth II named Dr. Sacks a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to medicine. He is currently at work on his next book on vision and the brain. He is also working on an essay about Darwin and botany, and continuing his investigations into schizophrenia and community care.