Sacks was born Oliver Wolf Sacks on July 9, 1933, the youngest of four children born to two North London Jewish physicians, Samuel Sacks and Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England.
At the age of six, Sacks and his brother Michael had to flee London to escape the Blitz during World War II. Sacks remained in a boarding school in the Midlands until 1943 under the rule of spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child administration. He was an amateur chemist and in 1951,matriculated at The Queen's College in Oxford. Sacks graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in physiology and biology in 1954. He earned his Master of Arts and later a BM BCh, which qualified him to practice medicine.
Sacks left England and travelled to the United States via Canada. While in the U.S. he held residencies and took up fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. After converting his BM BCh to the American-equivalent, M.D., Sacks moved to New York in 1965 and started practicing neurology.
In 1966, Sacks began his work at Beth Abraham Hospital where he encountered patients with a sleeping disease called encephalitis lethargic, in which those afflicted cannot move on their own - "human statues." He treated the patients with a (then-experimental) drug, L-Dopa, which brought them back to life. This experience was the basis of his book "Awakenings."
Sacks filled his life with the practice of medicine, and held positions at Bronx Psychiatric Center from 1966 to 1991, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1966 to 2007 and the New York University School of Medicine from 1992 to 2007. Sacks' joined the faculty of Columbia University Medical Center as a professor of neurology and psychiatry in 2007. He was appointed Columbia's first "Columbia University Artist" for acting as a liaison between sciences and arts though his works.
In 2012, he returned to New York University School of Medicine as a professor of neurology and consulting neurologist in the epilepsy center. Sacks also had his own practice.
Sacks was an honorary medical advisor for the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF) and the first recipient of the Music has Power Award in 2000 for "his 40 years at Beth Abraham and honor his outstanding contributions in support of music therapy and the effect of music on the human brain and mind," Executive Director of IMNF Concetta Tomaino said in 2006.
Sacks was a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, an Honorary Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he was awarded the 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University. Sacks had been awarded honorary doctorates at 11 universities, in the United States and abroad. In 2005, Oxford University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) inducted Sacks as a member of the FFRB Honorary Board in 2010. In his bio for the award, Sacks' described himself as "an old Jewish atheist." The list of honors and awards is endless - he even had a main-belt minor planet named after him: 84928 Oliversacks.
Despite the prestigious titles and many awards, Sacks served as a neurological consultant to various New York City nursing homes that are run by the Little Sisters of the Poor from 1966 until he revealed his diagnosis in February of this year. He also served on the boards of The Neurosciences Institute and, being a lover of ferns, the New York Botanical Garden.
Sacks has contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times Review of Books. The New York Times hailed Sacks as the "poet laureate of modern medicine." His writing has been translated into 25 languages.
Sacks' published works blend neurology and literature. Besides "Awakenings," his most notable book is probably 1985's "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat." Other works include: "Migraine," "A Leg to Stand On" (based on Sacks' experience after an accident when he lost awareness of one of his legs), "Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf," "An Anthropologist on Mars," "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood" (based on his childhood), "Musicophilla: Tales of Music and the Brain" and "Hallucinations."
"The Mind's Eye" includes a disease that afflicted Sacks himself: prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, which is an inability to recognize faces. According to Sacks' website: "The Mind's Eye "tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world."
Sacks' most recent book was released on April 28 - his "impassioned, tender, and joyous memoir," as described on his website - "On The Move."
"As a young man, Sacks wrote to his parents that he could repay their benevolence by 'leading a fairly happy and useful life,'" The New York Times stated in their review of Sacks' memoir, "and he appears to have kept that promise. He is enamored of humanity despite often finding individual people difficult, splendidly inclined to what he characterizes as 'childish, ingenuous enthusiasm.'"
When Sacks was ready to reveal his terminal cancer diagnosis to the public, he (perhaps unintentionally) summed up what the world would feel now, after it was his turn to go: "There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."
To read Sacks' obituary, CLICK HERE.
