Oliver Sacks: Difference between revisions

Oliver Wolf Sacks (born July 9, 1933, London), is an United States-based neurologist, who has written popular books about his patients; the most famous of which is "Awakenings," which was translated into a film starring Robin Williams and Robert de Nero.

Sacks considers his style follows the tradition of 19th-century "clinical anecdotes", a literary-style that included informal case histories, following the wrtings of Alexander Luria^[1]. Sacks is a childhood friend of Jonathan Miller^[2] and a cousin of the late Abba Eban^[3].

Biography

The fourth and youngest child of a prosperous North London Jewish medical family: his father Sam a doctor, his mother Elsie a surgeon. Aged six in 1939, he was evacuated to a boarding school in the Midlands for four years^[2].

Sacks earned his medical degrees from Oxford University while a member of The Queen's College. In 1960, he went to Canada on holiday, and on arrival sent his parents a one-word telegram: "Staying". Sacks hitch-hiked to the Rockies, and then down to San Francisco, where he fell in with the poet and motorcycle enthusiast, Thom Gunn^[2]. Sacks became a resident in neurology at UCLA.

After converting his British qualifications to American recognition, Sacks moved to New York where he has lived since 1965, and taken twice weekly therapy sessions since 1966^[2]. Sacks is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor. He has a practice in New York City.

Sacks describes his cases with little clinical detail, concentrating on the experiences of the patient (which was in one case himself). The patients he describes are often able to adapt to their situation in different ways despite the fact that their neurological conditions are usually considered incurable.

His most famous book, Awakenings, upon which the movie of the same name is based, describes his experiences using the new drug L-Dopa on patients who were victims of the 1920s sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica) epidemic. 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 and was the subject of a 1986 opera by Michael Nyman. The title article of An Anthropologist on Mars is about Temple Grandin, a professor with high-functioning autism. In his book The Island of the Colour-blind he describes the Chamorro people of Guam, who have a high incidence of a form of ALS known as Lytico-bodig; a devastating combination of ALS, dementia, and parkinsonism. Along with Paul Cox, Sacks is responsible for the resurgence in interest in the Guam ALS cluster, and has published papers setting out an environmental cause for the cluster, namely toxins from the cycad nut accumulating by biomagnification in the flying fox bat.^{[4] [5]}

Sacks's writings have been translated into 21 languages, including Catalan, Finnish, and Turkish.

Oxford University awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in June 2005.

In March 2006, he was one of 263 doctors who published an open letter in The Lancet criticizing American military doctors who administered or oversaw the force-feeding of Guantanamo detainees who had committed themselves to hunger strikes. ^[6]

Books

• Migraine (1970)
• Awakenings (1973)
• A Leg to Stand On (1984) (Sacks's own experience of losing the control one of of his legs after an accident)
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
• Seeing Voices: A Journey Into The Land of the Deaf. (1989). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06083-0.
• An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)
• The Island of the Colour-blind (1997) (total congenital color blindness in an island society)
• Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)
• Oaxaca Journal (2002)

Essays and articles

• "The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)" (positive experiences of blind people) - published in "The Best American Essays 2004", Ed. Robert Atwan
• New York Times Editorial by Oliver Sacks regarding the Island of Stability theory

Television series

• The Mind Traveller

See also

• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

References

External links

• Oliver Sacks website
• Oliver Sacks Fan page
• 1989 audio interview with Oliver Sacks by Don Swaim
• Wired article (04/2002)
• New York Times Op-Ed piece about encephalitis lethargica.

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