Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (born 1933 in London, United Kingdom) is a neurologist who has written popular books about his patients. He considers it following the tradition of 19th-century “clinical anecdotes”, literary-style informal case histories. His favorite example is Aleksandr Luria[?]'s The Mind of the Mnemonist[?].

He earned his medical degrees in Queen's College, Oxford and ended up as a resident in neurology at UCLA. He has lived in New York since 1965. He is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine[?], adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU school of Medicine[?] and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor[?]. He has a practice in New York City.

Sacks describe his cases with little clinical detail, concentrating on the experience of the patient (which in one case was himself). Many of the cases are incurable or nearly so but patients are able to adapt to their situation in different ways.

His most famous book, Awakenings (after which the movie of the same name is based) tells about his experiences with the use of new drug L-Dopa[?] with the patients of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica[?]. It was also the subject of the first film made in the British television series Discovery.

In his other books he describes cases of Tourette syndrome and various effects of Parkinson's disease. The title article of The man who mistook his wife for a hat is about a man with visual agnosia (this case was the subject of a 1987 opera by Michael Nyman). The title article of Anthropologist on Mars is about Temple Grandin, professor with high-functioning autism. Sacks' writings have been translated to 21 languages including Catalan, Finnish and Turkish.

Books

• Migraine (book) (1970)
• Awakenings[?] (1973)
• A leg to stand on[?] (1984) (Sacks' own experience of losing the control of his legs after an accident)
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat[?] (1985)
• Seeing Voices[?] (1989) (Deaf culture and sign language)
• Anthropologist on Mars[?] (1995)
• The Island of the colorblind[?] (1997) (Total congenital colorblindness in an island society)
• Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)
• Oaxaca Journal[?] (2002)

External Links

• Oliver Sacks official page at http://www.oliversacks.com/
• Oliver Sacks fan page at http://members.tripod.com/~oliversacks/sacksopen.html