Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933-2015) was born in London, youngest of four sons of two Lithuanian Jewish doctors. Oliver spent most of his childhood in London, though his GP father and surgeon mother sent him to a rural boarding school for 4 years in WW2 to escape the horrific air raids. Sacks hated bullying and cruelty and 4 years later, back home, he hid in his basement chemistry lab. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) discussed how growing up in a home of polymaths fostered his investigative skills.
![]()
Dr Sacks favourite activities:
playing the piano and writing books
He got a bachelor’s degree in physiology (1954) & medicine (1958) from Queens College Oxford. He did his house-year at Middlesex Hospital London in 1959 and was house-surgeon at Queen Elizabeth, Birmingham in 1960. Dr Sacks moved to the US to work at Mt Zion Hospital, San Francisco (1961–62), then a neurology residency at Uni of Calif.
Sacks was led by Russia's neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902–77). Luria's vital research was in linguistic aphasia, anterior lobe pathology, speech dysfunction and child neuropsychology. The two men never met, but they maintained a 5-year correspondence and in 1977, Sacks wrote his mentor’s obituary for The London Times.
Explore strange brain pathways in famous case histories like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), using his patients’ disorders to discuss the human condition i.e he carefully illuminated patients’ existential AND pathological conditions. Some critics called his blend of medicine & philosophy insightful eg The Independent of London called him the “presiding genius of neurological drama”. Reviewers praised his graceful prose.
Some critics found him infuriating, accusing Sacks of exploiting his subjects. Scientists said that his clinical stories over-emphasised the stories and under-emphasised the clinical. A London neuroscientist doubted whether Sacks had provided any scientific insights into the neurological conditions he had written about in his many books (Guardian 2005).
A million copies of Sack’s books were printed in the U.S and his accounts of neurological oddities were soon adapted for Hollywood, opera, theatre and literature. An opera based on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat premiered in London in 1986 and in the Lincoln Centre NY in 1988. Robin Williams portrayed a Sacks-like doctor in the film version of Awakenings (1990), along with Robert De Niro. Richard Powers based a central character on him in his novel The Echo Maker (2006). The Girl in the Letter (2018) and The Missing Daughter (2019) by Emily Gunnis did very well.
Recording personal experiences in volumes written for popular audiences did well. Having injured a leg in a mountaineering accident, he learned first hand how a physician’s dismissal of a patient’s condition hindered recuperation, as he told in A Leg to Stand On (1984).
Still recording the amazing circumstances of the patients he met and their remarkable adaptations, Sacks wrote Seeing Voices (1989). He explored the ways in which sign language provided the deaf with communication AND served as a discrete culture. In An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), he documented the lives of 7 patients living with difficult conditions including autism, and how they created functional lives.
Trips abroad were important. On his journey to Micronesia Sacks studied a population with a high incidence of colour blindness and to Guam to study a mysterious form of paralysis in The Island of the Colourblind (1997). He presented further case studies in The Mind Traveller (1998), a programme produced for tv. The Mind’s Eye (2010) investigated the compensatory mechanisms employed by people with sensory disorders. Hallucinations (2012) recorded conditions from epilepsy and drug use, to sensory deprivation that caused hallucinations.
In 1989 Sacks won a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of the influence of culture on the abnormal neurological processes underlying the rare inherited disease, Tourette Syndrome. Sacks also introduced Asperger Syndrome to lay audiences, humanising his patients.
![]()
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, 2007
For a slightly new angle, read Fenella Souter 2015 who wrote that this doctor was famous for his books about people with bizarre neurological disorders. But Dr Sacks had some very impressive mental quirks of his own.
playing the piano and writing books
Sacks moved to NY in 1965 for a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, becoming a clinical Prof of Neurology (1966–75). He also joined the charitable Bet Abraham Hospital NY as a staff neurologist (1966–2007), meeting patients who’d contracted a sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, during a much earlier epidemic (1917-27). These patients had survived sleeping sickness only to develop a Parkinson’s that caused immobility, depression, speechlessness or catatonia! Dr Sacks gave them the drug L-dopa, emerging as a treatment for similar symptoms in Parkinson’s. His clinical work at Bet Abraham led to his book Awakenings (1973). This book, about a group of patients with atypical encephalitis, won widespread attention.
Sacks was led by Russia's neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902–77). Luria's vital research was in linguistic aphasia, anterior lobe pathology, speech dysfunction and child neuropsychology. The two men never met, but they maintained a 5-year correspondence and in 1977, Sacks wrote his mentor’s obituary for The London Times.
Explore strange brain pathways in famous case histories like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), using his patients’ disorders to discuss the human condition i.e he carefully illuminated patients’ existential AND pathological conditions. Some critics called his blend of medicine & philosophy insightful eg The Independent of London called him the “presiding genius of neurological drama”. Reviewers praised his graceful prose.
Some critics found him infuriating, accusing Sacks of exploiting his subjects. Scientists said that his clinical stories over-emphasised the stories and under-emphasised the clinical. A London neuroscientist doubted whether Sacks had provided any scientific insights into the neurological conditions he had written about in his many books (Guardian 2005).
A million copies of Sack’s books were printed in the U.S and his accounts of neurological oddities were soon adapted for Hollywood, opera, theatre and literature. An opera based on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat premiered in London in 1986 and in the Lincoln Centre NY in 1988. Robin Williams portrayed a Sacks-like doctor in the film version of Awakenings (1990), along with Robert De Niro. Richard Powers based a central character on him in his novel The Echo Maker (2006). The Girl in the Letter (2018) and The Missing Daughter (2019) by Emily Gunnis did very well.
Recording personal experiences in volumes written for popular audiences did well. Having injured a leg in a mountaineering accident, he learned first hand how a physician’s dismissal of a patient’s condition hindered recuperation, as he told in A Leg to Stand On (1984).
Still recording the amazing circumstances of the patients he met and their remarkable adaptations, Sacks wrote Seeing Voices (1989). He explored the ways in which sign language provided the deaf with communication AND served as a discrete culture. In An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), he documented the lives of 7 patients living with difficult conditions including autism, and how they created functional lives.
Trips abroad were important. On his journey to Micronesia Sacks studied a population with a high incidence of colour blindness and to Guam to study a mysterious form of paralysis in The Island of the Colourblind (1997). He presented further case studies in The Mind Traveller (1998), a programme produced for tv. The Mind’s Eye (2010) investigated the compensatory mechanisms employed by people with sensory disorders. Hallucinations (2012) recorded conditions from epilepsy and drug use, to sensory deprivation that caused hallucinations.
In 1989 Sacks won a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of the influence of culture on the abnormal neurological processes underlying the rare inherited disease, Tourette Syndrome. Sacks also introduced Asperger Syndrome to lay audiences, humanising his patients.
The relationship between music and the mind
This skilled pianist analysed the relationship between music and the mind, and of patients with conditions relating to music in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). He pointed to music’s ability to reach dementia patients, showing that music appreciation is hard-wired into the brain. Sacks believed Mozart made him a better neurologist!
Though Sacks remained in the U.S, he never gave up British citizenship and he was made Commander British Empire in 2008. Other awards included honours from Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, National Science Foundation and Royal College of Physicians.
He wrote up his adventures On The Move (2015). And he also discussed his sexual identity for the first time, since realising he was gay in his teens. He settled into a LONG period of celibacy that lasted 35 years before he met and fell in love with writer Bill Hayes in 2008.
Dr Sacks remained active with age. In 2007, at 74, he accepted an interdisciplinary teaching position at Columbia. From 2012–15 he returned again to the New York Uni School of Medicine in Neurology. And despite the enormous success of his books, he never gave up his “unglamorous” medical practice, because it provided him with data and because he loved working with patients.
Though Sacks remained in the U.S, he never gave up British citizenship and he was made Commander British Empire in 2008. Other awards included honours from Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, National Science Foundation and Royal College of Physicians.
He wrote up his adventures On The Move (2015). And he also discussed his sexual identity for the first time, since realising he was gay in his teens. He settled into a LONG period of celibacy that lasted 35 years before he met and fell in love with writer Bill Hayes in 2008.
In Feb 2015 he announced his own terminal cancer. The ocular melanoma had spread to his liver, and he died at 82. His essays were published posthumously as The River of Consciousness (2017). The documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life was published in 2019.