In 1966, Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognised these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of encephalitis lethargica, the “sleepy sickness” that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life.
They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska) and the Oscar-nominated feature film (Awakenings) with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
The New York Times has referred to Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and he is best known for his compassionate explorations of the far borderlands of neurological experience, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has investigated the world of deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of totally colourblind people in The Island of the Colorblind.
He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and a more recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. He has said here that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does. In Musicophilia, Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, help give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organise people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia.
Sacks’s books and essays have been translated into dozens of languages, and they have inspired specialists in medicine, philosophy, ethics, neuroscience, anthropology, physical therapy, psychology—and the general public. He has deeply influenced our understanding of human illness and the ways in which we adapt to illness as patients, the ways we care for those who are neurologically challenged, and the fundamental ways in which illness affects our identity as individuals or communities.
Sacks’s work has not only inspired countless young people to embark on careers in medicine and health care; it has inspired and fertilised the work of a wide array of scientists working in subjects ranging from the mechanics of visual and auditory perception to the workings of memory and consciousness itself. His work has also permeated the culture at large, so that people now speak of “Oliver Sacks-like conditions” when they mean something odd and interesting that requires our compassion and understanding—or that sheds light on the ways in which the human brain functions and adapts and shapes our world. Even people who have not read any of his books are likely to have heard of his ideas—either on the radio, television, or internet, or in one of the many artistic adaptations that have been made of his work. Some of our leading artists and writers, including Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, and Brian Friel, have been inspired to adapt Sacks’s work; others, like Jonathan Lethem and Umberto Eco, have been deeply influenced by it. Hollywood has made two films based on Sacks’s narratives, and television now features “Sacksian” cases almost daily. His work has also inspired poets (Thom Gunn and W H Auden both dedicated poems to him), visual artists, dancers, and composers. Publishers now routinely publish not only scholarly works about, but the memoirs of people who are living with, many neurological conditions: Savant syndrome, autism, blindness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, schizophrenia, strokes, and even dementia—a cultural sea change that has been strongly influenced by the works of Oliver Sacks.
Sacks’s work (which he sometimes refers to as neuro-anthropology) has been supported by the Guggenheim and the Alfred P Sloan Foundations, and regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as in various medical journals. He has received a George S Polk Award for reporting, and the Lewis Thomas Prize from Rockefeller University, which recognises the scientist as poet.
Sacks is also known for his sense of curiosity and wonder, and his many non-neurological enthusiasms, including elements (particularly heavy metals), ferns (which he wrote about in Oaxaca Journal) and cycads (which he wrote about in The Island of the Colorblind); cephalopods (particularly cuttlefish); swimming; sushi; Mozart, Bach, and Darwin. He is currently working on a book about vision and the brain.
Fact File
Education and Post-Graduate Training
1954 Queen’s College, Oxford, B.A., Physiology and Biology
1955–1958 Middlesex Hospital (University College), London
1958 MA, BM, B.Ch. (Oxford)
1954–1955 Laboratory of Human Nutrition, Oxford University, Research Fellow
1959 Middlesex Hospital, London, internships in medicine, and neurology
1960 Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, house surgeon
1961–1962 Mt Zion Hospital, San Francisco, rotating internship
1962–1965 University of California, Los Angeles, residency in neurology and neuropathology
Appointments
1960–1961 Mt Zion Hospital, San Francisco, Research Assistant, Parkinsonism Unit
1965–1966 A Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, Fellow (neuropathology & neurochemistry)
1966–1975 Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Instructor in Neurology
1966–1968 Montefiore Hospital, Bronx, NY, Consulting Neurologist, Headache Unit
1966–2007 Beth Abraham Hospital, Bronx, NY, Consulting Neurologist
1966–1991 Bronx Psychiatric Center, Bronx, NY, Consulting Neurologist
1972 Little Sisters of the Poor, NY, Consulting Neurologist
1974–1976 Bronx Developmental Services, Consulting Neurologist
1975–1978 Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Assistant Professor of Neurology
1978–1985 Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Associate Professor of Neurology
1985–2007 Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Clinical Professor of Neurology
1992–2007 NYU School of Medicine, Adjunct Prof of Psychiatry (assigned to Neurology)
1999–2007 NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, Consulting Neurologist
2007– Columbia University Medical Center, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry
2007– Columbia University Artist
Honorary Degrees
2003 Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Doctor of Medical Science
2005 Gallaudet University, Doctor of Laws
2005 University of Oxford, Doctor of Civil Law
2006 Pontificia Universidad Catelica del Peru
2008 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Watson School of Biological Sciences, Doctor of Science
Memberships
Alpha Omega Alpha
American Academy of Neurology
American Fern Society
Authors’ Guild
British Pteridological Society
Bronx County and NY State Medical Societies
New York Mineralogical Club
New York Stereoscopic Society
PEN
Society for Neuroscience
Selected Awards and Honors
1970 Alpha Omega Alpha, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
1988 American Psychiatric Association, Oskar Pfister Award
1991 American Neurological Association, Special Presidential Award
1991 Assn of Neuroscience Depts & Programmes, Award for Education in Neuroscience
2000 Cornell University, AD White Professor-at-Large
2001 New York Times Editors’ Choice, Uncle Tungsten
2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet, Rockefeller University
2004 New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology
